Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) a friend or foe? Most people, fearing job losses to AI and machines will be quick to say AI is the enemy, something to worry about as it will take away jobs and machines will take over the world. Sure, AI will make us efficient, but fears of job losses are overplayed.
Putting fears to rest tech guru
Sebastian Thrun, CEO,
Kitty Hawk Corp and co-founder
Udacity said, “AI is not made to replace people, but augment people. Much like mobile phones have done for us.” Thrun was speaking at the ET Global Business Summit. Kitty Hawk Corp is working on electric cars while Udacity is an online learning platform offering short term courses in areas like AI, drones, machine learning etc.
AI is picking up patterns—be it driving cars, detecting cancers or selling products – and helping novices get better, emphasised Thrun. Giving examples, he explains, self-driving cars are all about machines learning after they watch people how to drive.
In medicine, there’s a shortage of dermatologists in the US-- there are only 10,000 dermatologists in the US and they earn salaries around $450,000 a year. Very few can detect skin cancers. “Making machines to do the diagnosis will help humans be better—that’s like a machine which is as good as a Stanford level human dermatologist,” says Thrun.