Artificial intelligence is a hot topic, and it emerged at CES even before I entered the conference halls. En route to this morning's sessions, my Uber driver and I discussed the growing impact of AI on different industries (driving is his side-hustle to help pay for his child's "very expensive private school," he explained). A product of rural America, he honed-in on the value of AI-driven ag tech for everything from crop farming to automation. We discussed the shift in labor markets that AI will bring, reducing demand for certain jobs while increasing the need for higher-skilled workers. And we settled on the appropriateness of government policies that will support private sector efforts to upskill workers as AI becomes an increasing part of daily living. And Zac explained that he had seen the impacts first-hand: His SAS services company had taken a 40% hit on revenues facing competition from AI-based services. He explained that he was retooling, but cautioned, "I don't have enough money to make the wrong decision."
ring sensors are becoming increasingly sophisticated
While AI is often viewed as a threat (a friend of mine took a different view, observing, "AI won't take your job, but the person who knows how to use AI will"), AI is better viewed as a tool. A session hosted by Deloitte today estimated that 50% of computing deployments will include machine learning (ML) – specifically, systems that rely on algorithms as they process data to create new processes. And 60% of edge computing next year is expected to use both predictive and generative AI. What is sobering, or exciting, about this is that "edge computing" was defined to include everything that we encounter in our daily lives, from retail sales to manufacturing to farming to healthcare.
Healthcare is ripe for AI. Thirty percent of global data emanates from healthcare. AI enables physicians and researchers to contextualize data and personalize it, enabling doctors to tailor treatments more precisely for individual patients. This is an important opportunity for rural spaces where access to individual specialists, let alone teams of conferring specialists, may be unavailable (for more information, see this recent Smart Rural Community paper on telehealth). AI can also be paired with wearables and ambient monitors that gather a continuous stream of user data. When processed, this information offers a more complete picture of users than a data snapshot that might be taken during a visit to the doctor.
heart rate, respiration and other vitals,
and can relay alerts to users and remote caregivers
At the same time, AI must be a "trusted model" that is not beset by AI hallucinations, or the risk of AI "creating" its own source material for responses. Who remembers the lawyer who got in trouble for submitting an AI-assisted brief that cited cases that had never been published? In contrast, the true power of AI is to amplify human potential, rather than replace it. AI is already used to position patients for MRI and CAT scans more effectively than traditional models, and audiologists can use AI tools to triage patient images for human review.
In these contexts, AI is not competing for anyone's job; it is simply (an ironic word choice) making a job easier and more effective. It can be perceived as a caring, dedicated partner – caring, affectionate intelligence, as opposed to cold artificial intelligence. Along the way, of course, retooling of human capabilities will be necessary. And steps to assist that retooling will be necessary to cultivate a workforce for AI-affected sectors. The transformative potential of AI is its ability to amplify human capabilities rather than replace them.