Kishor Basyal

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a buzz word these days, sparking curiosity among the general public and intelligentsia alike. It has even fired the imagination of technophiles. Hailed as the next frontier in technology, it continues to making impressive headway in almost every industry – be it manufacturing or services. There are already sectors -- too many to name -- where AI has already been adopted, boosting the efficiency of professionals in their jobs, many of which are either too tedious or too risky to venture out without employing AI technologies.
According to computer scientists researching AI technologies, this is just the beginning.
As investment for research and development of AI grows by leaps and bounds, it is getting increasingly alluring. It would be fair to say no industry will remain untouched with the wave of AI adoption. We are already seeing self-driving cars on the streets of the US and Europe, sophisticated face recognition softwares and hardwares, pharmaceutical industries employing powerful tools for drug discovery, among others. All of them are AI-powered.
AI is a computer system or a machine with the capability of learning on its own. Unlike conventional computer systems, which are programmed to run in a particular way by the software and hardware companies, AI writes programme for itself, learning from the data sets fed to it as inputs by the user. The goal of AI machine is to mimic the way human brain functions, called natural intelligence. Just like our brain grows up from the sensory inputs that is either fed to it or it comes across, what or how much AI learns is directly proportional to the amount of inputs it is fed to. The more inputs, the more its learning.
One of the major fields AI has made inroads into is Data Science. Since the dawn of Internet 2.0 and the availability of computers capable of processing a huge amount of data at a time, companies, like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Instagram, etc., begun flooding the internet with a data hitherto unseen. Then, the growth of data became so dramatic that it doubled in every two years -- and the trend continues to remain so ever since. Data, when processed turns into information. And information thus derived is the bread and butter of the aforementioned companies.
AI is also transforming pharmaceutical industry, one that manufactures drugs, including the vaccines against the pandemics like COVID-19.
There are millions of patients visiting the healthcare centres, and the data they generate from clinical trials such as radiography, x-rays, blood-tests, past medical history, etc., are far more. To glean valuable insights from processing all the available data is very hard for human brain, if not impossible. And that is when AI comes in handy.
The striking characteristic of AI is that there is no limit to what or how much it can learn, as earlier mentioned. As long as it is fed with newer and newer data set, it keeps on learning from them. So, the natural questions that arise are: What if the machine becomes more intelligent than the brain that created it and starts challenging us? Finding out that humans are the root cause of climate catastrophe, which is underway, what if it tries to wipe out our existence, finding their existence irrelevant?
Though this scenario is next to impossible to materalise in the foreseeable future, it cannot be ruled out outright. I guess people will frequently start asking these questions in not-so-distant future.