Is Human Intervention Needed For AI to be Successful?

There’s no doubt that more people now than ever have been interested in AI. The global market is expected to increase about 20 times by 2030. But does AI really have what it takes to be successful without human intervention?  

Research on AI has increased by twofold since 2010. Newly funded AI startups have increased almost three times between 2013 and 2022 with AI private investments increasing by 18 times in 2022 compared to 2013. Big countries such as China, Canada, Australia, and the U.S. have many businesses exploring or using AI at the moment. 

More than half of us are expecting our lives to change exponentially due to AI in the next several years, especially in areas such as education, transportation, shopping, entertainment, and safety. This is mostly due to ChatGPT, which has become a great game changer in recent AI advancements. ChatGPT actually hit 100 million monthly active users in January 2023, which broke the record for the fastest-growing application in history.

Even with all of these impressive advancements in recent years, it’s important to remember that AI isn’t perfect or self-sustaining. In fact, AI incidents and controversies have increased by more than 25 times since 2012. AI cannot make perfect decisions without human intervention, and are prone to making serious (and costly) mistakes. 

We have already experienced several examples of serious AI mistakes. For example, Rekognition erroneously identified multiple members of Congress as criminals while being unable to distinguish certain faces from one another. Amazon’s AI recruiting tool displayed bias when reviewing resumes, which ultimately affected the company’s hiring goals. In another incident, an AI soccer camera used by a Scottish soccer team mistakenly tracked a player’s bald head instead of the ball during a game. 

In our world today, some CAPTCHA images are currently generated by AI, but discerning what they show can become somewhat confusing and challenging. There has been interest in creating automated self-driving cars, but AI companies have scrapped the idea because there’s no way to train AI to consider all possible contingencies that can happen on the road. 

All of the above problems can be easily solved using human intelligence but not by AI alone as AI currently lacks several important abilities. These include narrowing its focus during research, setting its own prompts for what to explore, exacting its own will and manifesting it in design, exerting judgment about data on its own direction, having a desire or will to accomplish tasks and more. AI essentially cannot tap into soft skills that humans possess like creativity, empathy, and teamwork that can help it determine the right actions to take. 

Some applications, including ChatGPT, can pass the Turing Test, which is used to see whether an AI can become intelligent enough to pass as a real human. Nonetheless, no platform has ever passed the Lovelace Test that is designed to see if an AI can produce something unexpected or unexplained by its human creators. As a result, major world leaders and technology experts are signing a petition to halt the development of AI as advanced AI could lead to significant change for life on Earth and therefore must be managed with extreme care and resources. 

However, with the right human guidance, AI could expand its roster of jobs and achieve the position of “artificial general intelligence.” Using the power of AI along with human intelligence to accomplish big tasks in a short amount of time adds the human element back into AI that helps to accent and boost its ability. This combination can lead to better advancement of AI in ways such as the ability to multitask on multiple projects, make moral decisions, and add empathy to decision-making, but only when human knowledge and experience is combined with AI curation. 

AI especially needs creativity and adaptability in order to be of beneficial use to humans. Since AI is inherently motiveless and requires a human element, it’s up to humans to direct it through curation, and this can be done by asking questions and designing actions that stem from basic questions such as which criteria do we include? Unlocking the potential of AI all starts with human interaction, and those who can create human-centric commands are the most capable of creating the AI of the future.

Written by Brian Wallace.
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