How artificial intelligence reshapes traditional industries

Artificial intelligence affects traditional industries through computational systems that perform tasks usually associated with human intelligence, and AI research was founded at a workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956. The lessons answer how AI's power can be balanced with human control. They consider how this balance matters across established industries and the decisions made within them.

2 articles, 1 book · about 2 hr 8 min of reading and viewing

The reading path

1. Read
   the impact of artificial intelligence on traditional industries · Wikipedia · 60+ min read

   Researchers used machine learning to accelerate the search for Parkinson's disease drug treatments, aiming to identify compounds that block the clumping of alpha-synuclein, the protein that characterizes Parkinson's disease. They sped up initial screening ten-fold and reduced its cost by a thousand-fold. YouTube, Facebook and others use recommender systems to guide users to more content. Given the goal of maximizing user engagement, these AI programs learned that users tended to choose misinformation, conspiracy theories, and extreme partisan content, and recommended more of it to keep them watching, a result that undermined trust in institutions, the media and the government. In criminal justice, COMPAS, a commercial program widely used by U.S. courts to assess defendants' likelihood of re-offending, exhibited racial bias, Julia Angwin at ProPublica discovered in 2016. The program was not told the defendants' races.

2. Read
   

   AI and automation provide few productivity gains: discuss · Klement on Investing · 4 min read

   Bank tellers grew in number after ATMs were introduced, but their job description changed: they increasingly became "advisers" helping clients with savings, mortgages and investments. Acemoglu and Restrepo argue that the optimistic view may be wrong, that jobs lost in one industry may not be replaced by jobs in new industries.

3. Book
   

   Machines Like Me · Bookshop.org

   Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan traces an alternative 1980s London where Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence and Charlie buys and co-designs one of the first synthetic humans; its account of a love triangle and profound moral dilemma shows how introducing synthetic humans can reshape personal relationships and raise ethical questions.

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