“AI is likely to be either the best or worst thing to happen to humanity.” – Stephen Hawking
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been transforming the globe with its many salient features, touching upon our lives personally and professionally. Almost all segments of industry are influenced by the spread of AI, leveraging its potential to the utmost degree. AI has turned out to be instrumental in bringing other modern-day technologies (like IoT, machine learning, big data, and robotics) closer to us.
Moreover, the recent pandemic has served as a catalyst in encouraging the business world to adapt to AI-based technologies for enhancement of their organizations. Indeed, the size of the global artificial intelligence market is estimated to reach 309.6 billion dollars by 2026, at a compound annual growth rate of 39.7% during the forecast period.
AI has been expanding the technology landscape by serving multiple layers like continuous delivery, serverless microservices, orchestration, multi-cloud computing, and data analytics. It has been generating a lot of economic value for organizations, and we are witnessing an increasing involvement of AI in our daily routines.
Nonetheless, however rich the technology may be, it can’t always outperform humans. There are still some limitations; certain activities are not yet able to be executed through artificial intelligence development alone.
But, before we have a look at what AI can’t do, let’s take a quick glance at its numerous capabilities.
Artificial Intelligence – What Can It Do?
AI is everywhere, be it in your business, your home, or your smartphone. You can certainly say AI is ubiquitous and very useful to humankind, yet it does have its problems—privacy concerns and difficulty in troubleshooting errors, to name a few.
Overall, there is a lot coming together with AI—both good and bad—and we need to find a way to properly use it and live with it.
Here are some of the significant things that AI can do:
- Self-driving cars
- Predict your preferences and offer relevant recommendations
- Track down illegal activities such as human trafficking or smuggling
- Help diagnose rare diseases and treat them
- Utilization of AI chatbots for human-like assistance
- Online shopping and advertising
- Machine translations
- Digital personal assistance
- Help people with disabilities to read, write, see, speak, smell, touch, and move with limitations
- Play games
- Recognition of emotions in speech or written text
- Security in homes and organizations
And many more…
Artificial Intelligence – What Can’t It Do?
At the same time, there are many things that AI still has not been able to accomplish. Though there is a speedy advancement in AI-related mechanisms, there are a few things that still lag.
Briefly, we could say that AI can’t multitask, and it can’t feel sympathy or empathy for anyone. As a result, AI can’t completely replace human labor and certainly not professionals such as lawyers, writers, designers, developers, or psychiatrists.
With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at some of the things AI still can’t do very well, if at all.
AI Can’t Write Software
AI, however developed it may be, lacks the human understanding needed to write software code. Developing code requires a great deal of human thinking, as it involves error detection, possible hurdles, customer perception, real world scenarios, etc.
All these thought processes may not be feasible through AI since it can’t think deeper. AI can surely help with finding patterns, software testing, test case generation, and test arrangements, but it can’t write the code itself.
Furthermore, AI can’t find malware or do creative writing. It can create content directly based on guidelines, but it must be overseen by humans since AI has limited creative capability with a less genuine focus on emotions.
AI Can’t Independently Accomplish Tasks With Compassion, Ingenuity, and Innovation
AI is of great help to humankind, in the sense that we feel it is replacing certain laborious human activities. However, it lacks a few attributes that only humans possess. AI is not able to conceptualize, plan, and create something, given a set of associated goals. It can’t choose objectives and implement activities based on those chosen tasks.
AI cannot feel any emotion. It may try to replicate human feelings but can’t bring the necessary authenticity to the table. There may be robots that can replace humans but only in mundane tasks, not in offering emotional services.
AI may fall back when it comes to performing complicated tasks. It can work on predefined simple tasks, but it may not be able to give perfect results when there are uncertain or complex areas of handling things.
AI Can’t Perceive the Reason and Impact Equation
AI techniques can find out detailed patterns and data correlation, provided they have the underlying raw data with them. But AI is unable to understand real-life scenarios, including the reasons behind their occurrence and any further impact they may have.
Overall, AI can function in situations but cannot understand the basic cause behind it. It will not be able to see the world the way we do, and that will always be a gap that humans must fill.
AI Can’t Make Moral Decisions or Invent on Its Own
AI cannot make moral decisions on its own. It does not have any emotion, and hence, when a moral judgment must be made, AI needs to depend upon human interaction. Self-driving cars are in vogue, but there must be human involvement, since on the road, the car can’t make all the decisions on its own.
Undeniably, AI can help accelerate and automate, but when it comes to complete innovation, it can’t help without human resources. AI is excellent at playing by the rules, but it can’t create the rules from the start. It can only base its decisions on past experiences and can’t think out of the box.
Moreover, AI cannot make instant decisions based on the current scenario or surroundings like humans can. It sticks to its predefined rules and involves no morality in its decision-making.
AI Can’t Utilize Common Sense
A very significant quality that humans have—that AI does not—is common sense. This is very important in all routine activities, and that is where humans have the upper hand. AI cannot grasp any concept on its own using reason, since it depends only on predefined facts and figures.
There are many facts that exist in this world because of common sense used by humans. AI may not be able to perceive these facts if they don’t coincide with an established set of actions. AI can’t prepare models of things mentally using the environment and experience, as humans do; it can merely link the relationship in the raw data to the model that it is looking at.
AI Development Continues to Rule
Artificial intelligence and AI solutions are instrumental in our lives, on a personal and a professional level. Almost all industry segments—healthcare, transportation, finance, entertainment, education, retail, etc.—have been benefiting from the use of AI.
Yes, as we saw in this post, there are things that AI has not been able to accomplish as of now. But the way it is growing, and AI development companies are expanding, the next few years might see AI outperforming humans in the activities above! Only time will tell how widespread AI will be in the coming years.
