If you are not living under a rock, you must have already heard about AI (Artificial Intelligence). It’s alright if you don’t understand it completely or even partially, most of the people talking about it also don’t. Even your neighbor’s good-for-nothing son also is an expert on AI and will tell you which prompts to use.

However, you must have an opinion about AI based on what you have been hearing. AI taking away jobs, helping you with office work, writing, and school work, impacting all walks of your life.

But is all that excitement and fear valid about AI? Will it really take away jobs? Will it render many jobs useless? Will there be no need for artists?

Think about it a little, if you are above 30, you must have seen or heard such trends and such rumors in your lifetime already. Has anything earth-shattering happened that has rendered people useless or taken away multiple jobs overnight? How many times have the doomsday prophecies held? If they did then we wouldn’t be here in the state that we are today.

Will AI take away your job?

Depending upon what you work on maybe in some cases it will. The rudimentary tasks that a human is doing today could go away. But then if you’re doing such tasks you want to get out of that work and want to move to do different and more creative tasks. Even if AI won’t take your job, you will leave it in a few years as you mature. And even if AI does remove the need for some jobs it won’t be overnight or in a few weeks or even months.

Remember the time when there were physical forms and there were brokers who used to fill those forms, pay your bills, and do other chores for a fee? With computers coming in and everything becoming online, didn’t they lose their jobs? Yes, they did and they moved on to other types of jobs over the years. They didn’t become unemployed or struggled to make ends meet as soon as the computers or internet came. It took decades to roll out these changes and still, there are many areas where those brokers flourish because not all the departments and tasks can be done on computer or internet.

Will there be no Artists anymore?

So the AI can now create paintings, write poems, songs, stories, etc. So does this mean the death of artists and they should move on to other jobs?

Real artists are creatives are those, who can get inspired by things and people around them but will leave a mark of creativity and originality in their work. There is a story behind everything that they create. Something that touches the human senses and admires or celebrates it. It could be a painting, sculpture, poem, or song.

In this era of AI, the value of an original artist is going to increase rather than go down. If it’s about creating copies of a painting or writing cheat songs, the AI can learn from existing material and provide multiple variations of that. However, can it produce something original like a human creative mind? We still need to see that. But I seriously doubt that.

Will it become easier to Cheat and Fraud?

Initially, it will be (and already is) easier to cheat by getting AI to do stuff and representing it as your own. We are already reading news and articles about how students are using AI to write their essays, writers are using AI prompts to generate blog content, and even books. New musical tunes or photos are coming out where it’s difficult to tell the difference who created it.

But is this something new? Weren’t musicians already stealing music? Weren’t the ghostwriters writing content? Weren’t photoshopped pictures already floating? All of this was happening and AI is just making it a little easier to do that. However, as technology is growing, it’s growing for bad and good. There will be ancillary use of it to identify what’s created through AI. Also, with its widespread use, governments are already mulling different laws that will restrict its use in sensitive areas, and/or all things AI generated will bear some kind of mark that makes it easier to differentiate.

Do we all need to learn AI or we will be obsolete?

Every time a new technology comes into the market, it’s considered the best and propagated that it needs to be learned by everyone or we will lose jobs or become obsolete. If you are not in the tech job then you don’t need to learn AI.

Many technologies have come in the past with the same claims and nobody is rendered obsolete overnight. Moreover, once a technology matures and its usage is widespread, it automatically finds its place in people’s daily lives without having to specifically ‘learn’ it.

Even if you are in the tech industry, you must know from experience how every tech that comes is touted as a game changer and everybody is pushed to learn it but how many techs have lived long enough? Weren’t we creating the same kind of furor about blockchain until last year? And aren’t millions of tech folks still working on many old techs from the past? Cobol? ASP? Visual Basic? Anyone?

How long before the AI takes over the world?

AI is a natural progression and it’s not something that we have been seeing abruptly. For many years people have been working on large data models and there have been incremental technological improvements to process them better, and faster. All of this is now turning into deducting the meaning of those data models faster and more easily accessible to the public at large. And the logical next step was predicting or generating results based on the trends captured within those data models.

Now different features of AI are being used in different walks of life or areas. Existing tools are integrating AI features to write quick snippets, answer commonly asked questions, generate images, etc. to begin with. This will get embedded into many other day-to-day use cases like identifying fraud, suggesting/reminding health tips, better communication methods, and many more.

But will it take over the world? Not at all. It will get embedded in everyday life and help us/create problems for us in some cases but it can’t take over the world (at least in our lifetime or our children’s). It’s yet another tech that will aid us like many others in the past. But its widespread use and getting benefits out of it will also take a long time. We will still be talking about embedding it 5 to 10 years down the line.

Is AI good or bad?

It depends upon how we want to perceive it. Technology can be used for multiple things. Whether it’s being used more constructively or destructively will depend upon us. It is going to make some things easier and faster and maybe even render some jobs useless in a few years. But then it also offers an opportunity to invest those efforts in exploring something new, doing something else that you always wanted to do, progress with your life, and create better.

So let’s look at AI as simply a technology like any other, a natural progression that will aid us in exploring the few more unknowns of this world.