{"id":1275,"date":"2017-10-13T08:05:53","date_gmt":"2017-10-13T07:05:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/?p=1275"},"modified":"2026-08-29T10:28:39","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T09:28:39","slug":"u6-3-the-future-impact-of-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/2017\/10\/13\/u6-3-the-future-impact-of-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"U6.3 The future impact of AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a term used to signify intelligent behaviour by machines \u2013 a field of research which started in the 1950s. Two significant milestones in the development of AI were when IBM\u2019s Deep Thought programme beat Garry Kasparov, a reigning world chess champion, in 1997; and in 2016 when Google\u2019s DeepMind AlphaGo programme beat a professional Go player. Shortly after this, developments in the use of neural networks led to the introduction of generative<\/strong> AI models<\/strong> capable of generating, “text, images, videos, audio, software code or other forms of data. These models learn the underlying patterns and structures of their training data, and use them to generate new data in response to input, which often takes the form of natural language prompts.<\/em>” [this italicised text copied from Wikipedia]. By the mid-2020s several generative models were freely available on-line and were being used by huge numbers of the general public. More advanced or specialist models, and\/or larger usage limits, were also available at a price to individuals and business organisations. As AI’s capabilities continued to advance rapidly (some said towards ‘Artificial General Intelligence’ – AGI), business and governments increasingly felt the need to make use of the technology in their operations – despite the fact that ‘hallucinations’ were inevitable in most AI outputs. However, some were warning that AGI would never be reached, that the systems were too error prone to be relied upon, that the AI companies would never make a profit, and that the industry had over-invested and would crash. Despite such concerns, AI’s prominence continued to rise throughout the later-2020s. Assuming its continual development, we can speculate that the way we deal with our digital objects and collections might be impacted by AI in the following series of steps, each one taking greater advantage of an increasingly capable technology:<\/p>\n

A. AI to collect digital objects at our specific request: <\/strong>In future systems we might have an AI which can not only collect together items within one system (eg ‘Collect together all photos of people playing football’) but is also capable of working across different systems to, say, ‘collect all photos that we look at for more than 10 seconds in my email, messaging systems and social media systems’<\/p>\n

B. AI to collect digital objects at our general instruction:<\/strong> This is similar to step A except that we won\u2019t have to specify the systems we want it to monitor. We\u2018ll just provide a blanket instruction such as \u2018collect everything to do with any shopping I do\u2019, or \u2018collect all photos I look at\u2019, and the AI will address the request across all the systems we use. At this stage the AI should also be taking care of all our backup requirements.<\/p>\n

C. AI to understand what it sees in the digital objects<\/strong>: If we have asked the AI to collect objects for us, in this step it will be capable of fully understanding the content of the objects, and of having a conversation about what they are and the connections between them. At this point there will be no need for indexes to digital collections since the AI will know everything about the objects anyway; it will be able to sort and organise digital files and to retrieve anything we ask it for. The AI will also be handling all our digital preservation issues \u2013 it will just do any conversions that are necessary in the background to ensure that files are always readable.<\/p>\n

D. AI to exploit our digital objects for us at our request:<\/strong> Now that the AI has control of all our objects and understands what they are, we may just be able to say things like, \u2018assemble a book of photos of the whole of our family line and include whatever text you can find about each family member and have three copies printed and sent to me\u2019.<\/p>\n

E. Eventually we leave it all to AI and do nothing with digital objects ourselves: <\/strong>By this stage the AI will know what we like and don\u2019t like and will be doing all our digital collecting and exploiting for us. We\u2019ll just become consumers demanding general services and either complimenting or criticising the AI on what it does.<\/p>\n

The last stage above reflects one of the possible futures described by Yuval Harari in his book \u2018Homo Deus\u2019 in which AI comes to know us better than we do ourselves, since it will fully understand the absolute state of the knowledge we have and be able to discount temporary influences such as having a bad day or some slanted political advertising. This clearly represents a rather extreme possible situation; nevertheless, given what we know has happened to date, we would be foolish to discount either the rate or the content of possible development. However, we should also remain absolutely clear that it will be us, as individuals, that are deciding whether or not to take up each of the steps described above.<\/p>\n

Throughout this period of the rise of AI, we will still be dealing with our physical world and our physical objects. AI may be able to see the physical world through lenses (it\u2019s eyes), and be able to understand what it is seeing, and we may well get the AI to help us manage our physical objects in various ways. However, it won\u2019t be able to physically manipulate our objects unless we introduce AI-imbued machines (robots for want of a better word). This too is a distinct possibility \u2013 especially since we are used to having machines in our houses (we\u2019ve already made a start with robot vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers). However, having tried to think through the various stages that we would go through with using robots, I came to a bit of a brick wall. I found it very hard to envisage robots rooting round our cupboards, putting papers into folders, and climbing into the loft. It just seems unrealistic unless it was a fully fledged, super-intelligent, human-type robot \u2013 and that in itself brings with it all sorts of other practical and ethical questions which I\u2019m not equipped to even speculate about. Perhaps all that can be said with any certainty about such a future of AI software and robots, is that humans will take advantage of whatever technology is on offer provided it suits them and they can afford it – and provided, of course, that AI hasn’t become all-powerful and either just started to control everything we do, or has simply exterminated us: these being possibilities which were being actively discussed in the mid-to-late-2020s\u2026)<\/p>\n

To previous Unit<\/a>\u00a0 || \u00a0<\/span>To Contents<\/span><\/a>\u00a0 || \u00a0To next Unit<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a term used to signify intelligent behaviour by machines \u2013 a field of research which started in the 1950s. Two significant milestones in the development of AI were when IBM\u2019s Deep Thought programme beat Garry Kasparov, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-order-from-chaos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1275"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3091,"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1275\/revisions\/3091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pwofc.com\/ofc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}