For the first half of the 20th century, the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) was almost exclusively a science fiction fantasy. In literature and film, humanoid robots, machines with perceptive abilities, and other forms of artificial intelligence were the focus of many science fiction works—from Metropolis to I, Robot. In the second half of the last century, scientists and technologists began to passionately try to create AI.
The Impact of AI on Society
At the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Program on AI, co-host John McCarthy introduced the term “artificial intelligence” and helped to incubate an organized community of AI researchers.
In the late 20th century, significant advances in AI began to impact society on a broader scale. When IBM’s Deep Blue defeated chess master Gary Kasparov, the game’s reigning champion, the event seemed to mark not only a historic and unique defeat in the history of chess—the first time a computer had beaten a top player—but also the crossing of a threshold: Thinking machines had left the realm of science fiction and entered the real world.
The era of big data and the exponential increase in computing power under Moore’s Law allowed AI to explore vast amounts of data and learn how to perform tasks previously performed exclusively by humans. The pairing of generative AI (AI capable of generating text, images, video, or other data using generative/generative models) with large language models to create ChatGPT in 2022, the subsequent iterations, and the associated algorithms, served as a proof-of-concept that machine learning could produce technologies far more powerful and captivating than previous chatbots.
The results of this machine renaissance have permeated society: Voice recognition devices like Alexa, recommendation engines like the ones Netflix uses to suggest what movie you should watch next based on your viewing history, and the modest steps taken by driverless cars and other autonomous vehicles all symbolize a rudimentary stage of 21st-century AI.
ChatGPT 4, Dall-E, Midjourney, and other modern AI-powered systems are currently disrupting most business sectors. But the next five years of AI development will likely lead to significant societal changes that will far exceed what we have seen so far.
How will AI affect the future?
- Speed of Life
The most obvious change that many people in society will feel is the increase in the pace of engagement with large institutions. Any organization that regularly deals with a large number of users—businesses, government units, NGOs—will be forced to apply AI to its decision-making processes and its activities that address the public and consumers. AI will allow these organizations to make most decisions much faster. As a result, we will all feel life accelerating.
- Profit and Efficiency
Businesses will almost certainly be forced to integrate and exploit productive AI to improve their efficiency, profitability, and, ultimately, profitability. Companies’ duty to increase shareholder value, and their fear of being overtaken by competitors who are more aggressively integrating and deploying AI, will create an almost irresistible imperative: Either fully embrace AI or watch your investments plummet as your competitors catch up.
- The End of Privacy
Society will also see its ethical commitments tested by powerful AI systems, especially in the area of privacy. AI systems will likely know more about us than we know about ourselves. Our commitment to privacy has already been significantly tested by emerging technologies over the past 50 years. As the cost of deeply examining our personal data decreases and more powerful algorithms—capable of evaluating vast amounts of data—become more widespread, we will likely find that it was more a technological barrier—and less an ethical commitment—that led society to enshrine privacy.
- AI Laws
We can also expect the regulatory environment to become much more challenging for organizations using AI. Currently, across the globe, governments at every level, from local to national to interstate, are seeking to regulate the development of AI. In the US, for example, a new set of AI laws will be pushed forward, with state and federal authorities already drafting, implementing and enforcing new AI laws.
And the European Union is almost certain to implement its long-awaited AI regulation within the next six to 12 business quarters. As a result, the legal complexity of doing business will increase significantly over the next five years.
The European Union’s AI ACT, the world’s first major AI regulatory framework, passed its final vote in spring 2024, and many observers believe it will set a precedent for a clear and effective legal framework. But big multinationals are working hard to weaken these initiatives and nullify the proposed regulation. In fact, strong uncertainty is the key factor defining the AI regulatory arena on both sides of the Atlantic and will likely continue to do so, at least for the time being and for several years to come.
- Human-AI Teaming
A large part of society will also expect businesses and governments to use AI as a tool to augment human intelligence and expertise, or as a partner for one or more humans working on individual goals, as a counterbalance to its use to displace workers. One of the effects of AI, which as an idea was born a hundred years ago in science fiction stories, is that the tropes of the genre, notably the dramatic depictions of artificial intelligence as an existential threat to humans, are etched into our collective consciousness. Human-AI grouping, or keeping humans out of any process that is substantially affected by AI, will be key to managing the resulting fear of AI that permeates society.
What societal foundations will AI have a major impact on? The following sectors will be most affected by AI:
- Education
At all levels of education, AI will likely be transformative. Students will receive educational content and training tailored to their specific needs. AI will also determine the best instructional strategies based on students’ individual learning styles. By 2028, the education system may be barely recognizable.
- Healthcare
AI will likely become a standard tool for doctors and their assistants tasked with diagnostic work. Society should expect the rate of accurate medical diagnoses to increase. But sensitive patient data and the complexity of navigating the ocean of laws that protect it are also likely to lead to an even more complex medicolegal environment, shifting patient expectations around ownership and access to their medical data, as well as increasing the costs of doing business.
- Finance
Natural Language Processing (an interdisciplinary field of computer science, AI, and computational linguistics) combined with machine learning will enable banks and financial advisors, as well as sophisticated chatbots, to effectively interact with customers, across a range of typical interactions: credit score monitoring, fraud detection, financial planning, insurance policy issues, and customer service. Artificial intelligence systems will also be used to develop more complex and rapidly executed investment strategies for large investors.
- Justice
We should expect the number of small and medium-sized businesses to decline over the next five years, as small teams of one to three people working with AI systems do the work that used to take 10-20 lawyers – faster and more cost-effectively. Given the right incentives, productive AI is already capable of providing rudimentary summaries of applicable laws, draft contract clauses, and more. By 2028, the number of lawyers in the US is estimated to have declined by 25% or more due to the growth of AI, based on recent data and assuming it continues at a rapid pace.
- Transportation
In the near future, we will see more autonomous vehicles, both personal and commercial. From the cars many of us use to get to work to the trucks that transport goods along highways or the spacecraft that carry people and cargo to the moon, autonomous vehicle travel will likely be the most dramatic development on the road within the five-year period.
The Long-Term Risks
The perception that artificial intelligence poses an existential threat to humans has been around for almost as long as the concept of AI itself. But in the last two years, as productive artificial intelligence has become a hot topic of public debate and consultation, the fear of AI has taken on new dimensions.
The most realistic concern about AI is arguably the fear that human societies will cease to control systems that incorporate artificial intelligence. This is already happening, in pilot cases, in use cases such as algorithmic trading in the financial industry. What is sought is essentially the exploitation of the capabilities of these… synthetic minds, which operate at speeds that exceed those of the fastest human brains – and by many orders of magnitude.
Yet the existential threats articulated by Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, and other AI pioneers seem at best like the stuff of science fiction – unlike much of the science fiction that was developed 100 years ago, theirs is not the only promising one.
The long-term risk, however, is that specific opportunities will be missed. If organizations take the grandiose narratives of some Cassandras seriously and underinvest in AI, then human societies will miss out on significant gains in efficiency, potential innovations that flow from human-AI collaboration, and possibly even new forms of technological innovation, scientific knowledge production, and other modes of social innovation that might emerge from powerful AI systems.
