Is AI helpful or harmful?
Recently many have been fearful of the final form of the AI we are developing and how it will affect lives. However, I say AI is a helpful and useful tool when used for the right purpose in the classroom, agriculture, cybersecurity and many more areas.
The first thing that I think about is the use in the classroom.
According to elearningindustry, “Electronic grading has existed for many years in the form of computer tests and Scantron testing. The advancements in AI could allow teachers to hand off all assignments to an AI for grading so the teachers can spend more time with students individually and modify the curriculum to be more relevant for each class.”
There are downsides to having an AI grade paper, though. It requires a constant internet connection to work effectively, and AI is expensive. However, the time saved in the classroom with an AI will ultimately pay for itself time and time again.
An article from Lumen Publishing says that “AI provides the opportunity to use a large scale of knowledge that is in some way structured and suitable for use in the educational process to solve certain educational problems and which is personalized for each student.”
Smart learning devices, various software educational applications, adaptive intelligent virtual assistants, and chatbots. Today this is the stage of application of AI in education and this stage passes.
“The potential for AI use in education is extremely powerful,” said the writers of ‘View of Application of Artificial Intelligence in Education. “In addition to the ability to personalize and individualize the educational process, it is also an opportunity to collect and analyze great amounts of information, identify problems and issues that humanity does not have answers to today or anticipate potential difficulties in the future and find scenarios to reduce their negative impact on humanity. The more multimodal data will be processed. The better the awareness of the educational material content and the more scenarios will be invented to use the acquired knowledge in real everyday life.”
Problems and Opportunities for Sustainable Development.
Bear River teacher Sara Noah also has concerns.
“My biggest concern with AI is that students will use AI instead of doing the actual work for classes, especially writing. I am concerned that it will interfere with their learning”.
Her concerns are valid but personally, I think that AI will be a greater help than a hindrance.
New developments in education are not the only thing AI will bring to a new age.
Agriculture is just one of the many areas that are affected.
According to Apro-software and their article on AI in agriculture “AI and agriculture are becoming inextricably linked as we move into a new technological age of machine learning. It offers new and exciting possibilities from everything to seed germination, to maintaining the crop integrity, to the actual harvesting process.”
The UN has estimated that by 2050 the global population will have grown to over 9.7 billion people – that’s a lot of hungry mouths to feed. By that year there will be many more people, however, the acreage of farming land will have only increased by a minuscule 4 percent. The answer therefore is not to expand farmland to grow crops and raise livestock, but to make more efficient use of the land currently available.
Researchers can use AI to find out the perfect conditions for seed germination such as heat and moisture levels, to enable the crop to begin growing sooner than expected.
In a vacuum, I think the fear of AI is just an over reaction to changing times. “Artificial intelligence is not a substitute for human intelligence; it is a tool to amplify human creativity and ingenuity,” said Fei-Fei Li, co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and IT Professor at the Graduate School of Business.