Today, we see machines becoming more intelligent and capable than humans in many areas, from driving cars to diagnosing diseases. AI solves problems we cannot even approach, and it’s getting better every day — but what does this mean for us?
As AI becomes more sophisticated, some believe it will surpass human intelligence, while others worry AI will displace us from our jobs or make us obsolete. I’m an optimist: I believe combining human and machine capabilities leads us toward a symbiotic future where humans and machines work together to solve the problems neither can tackle alone.
Collaborating with AI allows humans to focus on creative and complex tasks while handling routine and repetitive ones
In its earliest iterations, AI was purely mechanical and limited in its ability to make decisions. As time went on, our understanding of AI grew exponentially, allowing us to build systems that could learn from mistakes and improve over time.
Nevertheless, there are still many tasks that humans are better suited to perform than AI. Tasks such as marketing research and product design still require human-level creativity and empathy to be successful.
That being said, AI can easily handle more monotonous, repetitive tasks. Thousands of the tedious jobs we dread can be automated by carefully designing a workflow in which each answer triggers a decision, an action, or another workflow.
To accomplish this, you must first identify a rule-based task to automate, then collect data related to the task, and select an appropriate AI algorithm. Once that has been done, you must then train the AI model using your data, integrate it into your workflow, and then develop an interface that allows other users to interact with your new AI model.
AI can handle any tasks that require decision-making based on data points rather than intuition. Currently, AI is streamlining manual processes such as data entry, inventory management, and payroll processing.
While machines can handle simple, routine tasks, they still have the potential to do so much more. For instance, AI can analyze enormous data sets to discover trends and patterns, and then use algorithms to predict outcomes in a wide variety of industries. These highly accurate forecasts enable humans to make much more informed decisions than ever before.
AI algorithms can also automate repetitive tasks that require significant manpower from human staff. For example, today’s chatbots can competently answer many customer questions without intervention.
By delegating mundane tasks to AI systems, businesses free up human employees to focus on things like strategy formulation or problem-solving. This collaboration saves valuable time, obtains accuracy across transactions, accelerates results, improves operational efficiency, and reduces costs.
When AI allows us to focus on creative tasks, it opens up a world of new opportunities. Instead of fearing a future in which AI replaces human input, we should embrace a symbiotic future that collaborates with AI to boost human productivity.
Integrating AI with emotional intelligence enables AI to understand and respond to human needs
By integrating AI with emotional intelligence, we can enable it to understand and respond to human needs. Emotional intelligence enables you to understand and regulate your emotions, as well as those of others, making it a crucial component of communication and skill that can be taught and learned.
As humans, we rely on emotional intelligence to recognize our own feelings and moods, understand why we feel the way we do, communicate our needs effectively with others, control our impulses, and weigh emotional information effectively when making decisions. Even though AI does not have emotional responses, it can be trained to understand ours and respond appropriately.
For example, an AI-powered robot may learn that when people are happy, we smile, which can help it formulate the best response from our emotional output. It can also improve customer service and healthcare by understanding and responding to human emotions and needs in the questions to online chatbots or phone calls.
Designing AI systems with ethical principles maintains a symbiotic relationship between AI and humans
The AI industry is still in its infancy, but as it grows and becomes more influential, we must ensure that we design AI systems with ethical principles in mind. The symbiotic relationship between humans and technology is not new — we have been using tools since the beginning of time to perform tasks that would otherwise be difficult or impossible without them.
However, as technology becomes more advanced and integrated into our day-to-day lives, it becomes increasingly important to consider how our use of these devices will affect society as a whole. Artificial intelligence has the potential to change how we live our lives, for better or worse. We need a thorough understanding of how these changes will affect us so we can make informed decisions about the path we want to take.
To create ethical algorithms together as a society, we need more people to understand how machine learning works. Without diverse voices from different backgrounds working on these problems, we will end up with an overly homogeneous set of values encoded into our AI systems.
Continuous learning enables humans and AI to adapt together in a mutually beneficial partnership
To thrive in a symbiotic future, both humans and machines must learn from each other. To learn from us, AI must understand our language, intonation, and context. At the same time, we need to know how machines think and learn.
A symbiotic relationship requires both humans and AI to progress together. AI can help humans do their jobs more efficiently and effectively, but it’s up to us as individuals and organizations to determine how we grow into using this new technology. We cannot become complacent and rely too heavily on technology. After all, any AI model is only as good as the data fed into it.
In the next few years, we will likely see AI become increasingly involved in our daily lives. As this happens, the human touch remains essential in developing the AI that will benefit us all.
Evolving into a symbiotic future with AI
The symbiosis of intelligent machines that work alongside us on a shop floor as a “co-bot” making production faster and more efficient, a robot dog that carries our groceries home while playing our favorite song, an intelligent exoskeleton that becomes hard or soft depending on our task and required posture, a robotic voice in our ear that provides us real-time answers to questions in our mind — these are all no longer objects of fantasy and far-out fiction. They are real things that are already happening, prototyped or patented.
The robots are not coming. They are already here.
This symbiotic relationship between humans and machines is critical for the future of work, business, and society. It provides an opportunity for us to evolve as a species and take our creativity to new heights. However, this evolution will not happen on its own — we must actively participate in it by embracing our symbiotic future with open minds.
We are entering an era of symbiotic intelligence, where humans and artificial intelligence join forces to create better results. With the right training and design principles, AI can help us collaborate more effectively and improve our lives in ways we haven’t even imagined yet. As AI continues to transform our world, embrace the change by working with it, instead of against it.