This post is brought to you by 20th Century Studios.
Science fiction or sci-fi movies are popularly known to capture the imagination of the audience. By taking a familiar concept or the hottest topic of discussion, filmmakers use their imagination to think outside of the box and ask the question: What if? The goal here is to look at things from a different perspective. One that the audience may not have considered.
The Creator, the latest sci-fi action-adventure movie from 20th Century Studios, takes artificial intelligence (AI) and poses the question – What happens when humans deem AI as a threat to mankind? Well, you will need to watch the movie to find out the filmmaker’s answer. But let’s look at what’s happening in the world today that inspired this question.
For starters, AI is slowly starting to replace the human workforce. You can clearly see this process taking place at restaurants where cashiers are being replaced with electronic kiosks. One of the reasons for this decision is to employ AI to collect and analyse data on customer behaviour.
The AI will then present managers with information such as business time of the day, popular dishes, the combination of dishes, and time spent looking at the menu. This information will then be used to optimise business operations and increase profits.
But you might think “Well, at least F&B operators still need humans to cook and prepare the meals.” However, there are tech companies that are teaching AI-powered robots to cook. These robots can not only learn more recipes than human chefs, but they can also reproduce a dish consistently each time. Robots also don’t get tired and are better at multitasking, which is vital in the F&B industry.
Customer service is another area where AI is being deployed to answer and solve easy and basic problems now. This frees up human resources to focus on customers with more serious and urgent issues. But this also means companies now have one less reason to hire more people to deal with customer traffic.
Speaking about traffic, we are inching ever so close to autonomous vehicles with every passing day. At the moment, vehicles from most price segments are already equipped with semi-autonomous driving capabilities, reducing the need for driver input. Therefore, when autonomous vehicles hit the market, there will be no need for human drivers anymore.
In the education industry, AI is reducing student’s need to rely on tutors for learning. They can just type in their question and the AI will research and summarise the answers from multiple sources in a matter of seconds. What’s appealing about AI is that students can do this at any time of the day, for however long they want and from anywhere they want.
But this also raises another issue with AI that humans fear – If AI can create, then it can also manipulate. AI has the power to manipulate digital data, which is how everything is stored and consumed in this modern era. You have probably used photo editing software to remove an object from the image like it was never there. This ability to do so is enabled by AI.
Today’s AI has advanced to the point of being able to swap people’s faces in photos or videos and make them say things that they never did. Hollywood leverages this ability of AI to create the actor’s twin in a movie or to create a younger version of themselves. So, if that’s the case, then how can we tell if what we’re looking at is legitimate or doctored?
While Hollywood has used AI to entertain us, other parties have abused the power of AI to cheat, scam, and spread misinformation within the community. Therefore, it’s understandable why some people may not agree with the development of AI.
With that being said, today’s AI is still very far from being the threat that movies have portrayed it to be. Despite everything that AI is being developed for, it is still nowhere close to being perfect or completely replacing humans in the industry.
An AI-powered robot might sound like an ideal chef on paper, but today’s robotic tech is unable to recreate the motor capabilities of the human body. The robot simply cannot move as fast or as flexibly as humans, making them slow and inefficient. It is also the reason why AI still cannot replace humans in customer service as you will need to be very specific with your question. But as we all know, most of us tend to describe our issues in layman’s terms.
As powerful as AI might be, it still writes in a very clinical way. It doesn’t have that human touch to add a sentiment to a paragraph or bring out an emotion from the reader.
However, AI is being developed with the intention of helping, assisting, and enriching our lives. Researching a topic can be time-consuming and it’s a process that AI can help to accelerate by collecting information at a much faster rate. You can then spend the time you saved to analyse, interpret, and present the data.
Elsewhere, you’ve been benefiting from AI in your everyday life, but you may not have realised it. Each time you set the navigation to work, AI works in the background to analyse traffic load at that hour and recommends the best route out of the multiple different combinations of routes.
Watching recommendations on video platforms is made possible by AI. It analyses the type of video you like to watch and suggests other videos with similar content. Moreover, AI can also recommend videos on a different topic that were also watched by other people with similar interests as you. Content creators rely on these recommendations to help get their videos noticed.
Even your phone and computer now come equipped with dedicated AI processors that can identify your most used apps and their requirements and allocate the optimal system resources to improve performance and battery life while reducing strain on the hardware components.
These are just a couple of examples of how AI is helping to alleviate much of the heavy work from both humans and machines. Just like with every other piece of technology, it’s humans that decide the function of AI. As long as humans make the right decisions, AI will continue to be a friend rather than a foe.
The capabilities and self-awareness of AI will continue to expand as we humans continue to develop it. But if you want to know what can happen when humans advance AI far enough, you can find out by watching The Creator in cinemas starting 28th September 2023, best experience it in IMAX!
