By Billy Gibendi

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation have a huge part in our society, we don’t know what is to come. There are things that we do on a daily basis, that robots can’t automate for example love and show compassion, but AI machines are able to work and react like humans. Since AI came in a few years ago, robots are ever-present in our lives in hidden ways, from apps to algorithms. As the pace of this change accelerates, what is the likelihood that robots will be able to do your job? 

AI threatens to remodel how we all live our lives, with capabilities to be able to train systems to acknowledge emotions and behaviors. This can be seen currently happening within the financial services, call centres because machines are becoming better in understanding language. Other areas would be in law, where you’ll be able to contest your fines saving consumers millions. 

Thinking about machines replacing jobs, what comes to mind is routine production line jobs and not other domains of our lives. Consider for instance the world of sports journalism, the traditional means of social media and the laws of social journalism handbook would be producing chunk of journalism or report of what happens at the sports sector, someone will feed information about the happenings into a computer or robot and packaged over,processed and piece of journalism or report produced. The human component that may be elusive is the emotional character separated from the facts. 

Machines and robots are going to be a part of our future, some see that as a threat while others are ready to embrace this transformation where robots are more like us with human characteristics. Who is conversant with our future and how we’d work alongside machines are international questions. The future has already begun and as usual the place where dreams become a reality is leading the way. Within the world of medicine; a principle in development and research for Al within the workplace, huge strides are being made within the diagnosis of life threatening illnesses with results outperforming human components. 

Al challenges us not only in an exceedingly technological or economic way, it poses really important existential questions for us as humans to what really is meaningful in life, which stems from very many aspects not limited to religion,wealth, relations and work, of these are going to be impacted in one way or another. 

We got this massive opportunity now. Whether we realise this or not, it is happening and we have a role to play, both in terms of how we adapt, adopt this technology and use it for good.

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