AI and robots should be used for the benefit of humanity, we just have to be careful and keep AI ethics and safety in mind. Robots can be used for many tasks which would be too time consuming or expensive for humans to do, such as taking care of the elderly who may not be able to take care of themselves. Oftentimes elderly people rely on their children or caretakers to take care of them, but that can be expensive or the children may not have the time or skill to properly take care of them. In this case, using robots could help mitigate these problems while allowing other people to have the time to do other things.
Another way AI can help humans is by being unbiased and anonymous. However, this does require that the people making the AI follow AI ethics and safety and are as unbiased as possible. For example, 1 in 3 women in South Africa suffer from domestic abuse, and traditional call centers are not very helpful since they are typically only open Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, and many callers feel afraid of judgement. However, AI can be used for the same benefit while being open 24/7 and being completely anonymous. This clearly shows that AI and robots have many practical applications which can benefit humanity, as long as we focus on making them safe and ethical.
AI can also help in medical fields, such as fertility treatment. New AI technologies have helped develop ‘revolutionary’ new IVF (In vitro fertilization) techniques because it can quickly analyze embryos in minutes and rule out those with flaws or better predict which pregnancies are at risk of disorders. This greatly benefits women who would like to go through IVF, as AI can help make it safer and reduce the risk of any major complications. This also saves lots of time and manpower, as instead of having a human doctor look through the embryos and check for defects, AI can do it in just minutes.
Overall, AI has many applications for being used in a manner to benefit humanity and science-fiction stories about AI taking over the world will not be accurate, as long as we focus on following proper safety guidelines when developing AI. If we can do that, AI has no limits towards the good it can do towards humanity.
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