In this day and age, AI is used in almost every household, sometimes unknowingly. The acronym AI stands for “artificial intelligence”, and includes everything from facial recognition to self-driving cars. The idea was first created by Edward Feigenbaum and Joshua Lederberg in 1965. The pair eventually developed an “expert system” that mimicked human behavior and intelligence.

There are currently 4 categories of Ai: reactive, limited memory, theory of mind, and self-aware. Other examples of Ai are Chatbot, robotics, mobile apps, Google assistant, Apple’s “Siri”, and Amazon’s “Alexa”. These appliances are capable of answering general knowledge questions, turning on and off house lights, writing essays based on 3 words, and telling you the weather for the next month.

The fact that Artificial Intelligence has helped our society progress into the future is evident. For example, it has helped the disabled achieve day to day activities, such as communication. Also, it has given struggling people an outlet to confide in. Because of this,  it seems to be nothing but sufficient and extremely helpful. Although it can be those things, it may also lead to overpowering knowledge and excessive reliance.

Doesn’t giving a robot all-knowing power, as well as human disguises, worry you about how much control we will actually have over our own lives?

At surface level, you may think that you are putting your personal information into a small white electric box. This information can be as simple as home address, family connections, and job history. You could even just happen to state out loud where you are thinking of traveling in the next few weeks.

Diving deeper into who is behind that little white box, you may be surprised as to who is always listening and recording. According to MIT Technology Reviews, even when you haven’t said the AI’s “wake word”, it is still listening in for keywords and often downloads recordings. For example, Amazon even admitted that when you summon the popular “Alexa”, Amazon workers also tune in to listen.

Not only does AI overstep boundaries at times, but it also takes job opportunities from actual workers. According to the World Economic Forum, “ AI is expected to replace 85 million jobs worldwide by 2025.” This will leave an obscene amount of employees unemployed and vulnerable. Another warning sign from Artificial Intelligence is that it takes away from intellectual integrity in education. For example, websites like ChatGPT and Snapchat’s “My AI” are recently being used to completely generate essays and research papers by solely entering a topic.

According to Makeuseof.com and the Stanford Daily, “Teachers have experimented with feeding English assignments to ChatGPT and have received answers that are better than what many of their students could do. From writing cover letters to describing major themes in a famous work of literature, ChatGPT can do it all without hesitation.”  Artificial Intelligence is masking itself as the new and progressive “solution of the future”, while in reality, it can easily be the biggest threat to it.