Imagine how costly and daunting it would be to visit multiple doctors and diagnostic labs to investigate a serious health issue. What if AI could give you an exact diagnosis of your illness along with the right treatment? Yes, this has occurred and patients have benefited! Obviously, we are not suggesting that AI replaces doctors and diagnostic labs! However, AI is quickly becoming an irreplaceable part of our lives and influencing how we learn, work & grow. It has the potential to make incredible strides in the domains of health, education, job impact, productivity, public administration& so on. AI is certainly influencing human development but some areas need more light such as national security, privacy, lack of accountability, transparency, etc.
“The More Developed we get as Humans, the more Prosperity we Relish as a Community”
Human development is an area where every country and government want to see progress. In fact, the Human Development Index (HDI) is a global measuring stick that assesses the overall health of a nation. It is commonly known that countries, having a higher HDI rank are more developed. Therefore, by using AI to impact Human Development, we can indirectly boost our HDI ranking!
Let’s assess the critical human development thematic areas that AI can help improve-
Education
Education has to be considered as the bedrock of human development. The old adage “education is empowerment” perfectly fits here. AI can play a special role in transforming education. AI’s role in education is increasing day by day as it offers personalized learning and better pedagogy to students. It even helps educators create informative learning modules and assessments to effectively train students. The indirect benefit of this is that students may learn faster, decode tough concepts with ease, and become more competitive.
AI-based systems are becoming even more efficient than humans! In fact, in certain languages, virtual learning and image recognition, AI tools can achieve tasks much faster than humans. This is augmenting personalized learning experiences in the field of education.
Healthcare
AI has a great role to play in healthcare. If our healthcare improves, it will directly improve our life expectancy, mortality rate, etc. AI can help improve healthcare through better monitoring and diagnostics. This can help doctors evaluate better treatment strategies, and in some cases, even early detection of illnesses. AI can help save lives, diagnose diseases and extend life expectancy through AI-powered diagnostics and preemptive analytics. This can save the pharmaceutical industry up to $100 billion annually.
Job Impact
AI will definitely have an impact on our jobs. However, this will be seen either as job displacement or creation. So, some may lose out on their current jobs and others might see new opportunities on the rise. A study says that AI will affect around 40% of global jobs. Another study says that by the end of 2025, AI will create 97 million new jobs, and 85 million will be displaced. A change of this kind demands a need for constant upskilling as for the first time in ages, we don’t know what the job market will look like in the next 10 years!
Productivity Growth
AI could boost labour productivity by 1.5 times over the next decade. This can lead to higher employee productivity. If we look at AI as a service or tool, it can help employees become more efficient and achieve more work in less time. AI can also help employees become more productive as free time can act as beneficial in upskilling and handling more than one job role. However, employees can also become more complacent as AI tools can allow them to waste precious time and be unproductive as well!
Public Administration
Public Administration/Service is a huge area of governance. If it becomes more optimized and automated, it can reach and benefit a larger group of individuals. AI and blockchain-led systems can help manage public work with more efficiency. In fact, public services are becoming more accessible, and accountable via blockchain-led systems, and less of a bureaucratic burden, thanks to AI.
The Greatest Drawbacks of AI
The biggest downside of AI is that it might kill man’s purpose in life. How will we function in the future with enormous AI dependence? How will our social structures look with AI integration? If AI has an answer for each of our problems, then what will we use our brains for? This is a very meaningful question that we all must ask ourselves. We are moving into an AI-dominated world but still don’t have solutions to the ethical and privacy concerns that may arise from AI use. Humans have to make moral and ethical decisions all the time. One example is that of a judge in a court of law. Can we depend on AI to make legal judgments? Probably not.
Conclusion
To conclude, we can safely say that AI has a dichotomous impact on human development. It offers opportunities for growth and advancement and also presents challenges that need to be solved. One thing is for sure, AI is evolving and we need to stay updated with its changing dynamics so that technology helps progress society, not derail it!