Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the nature of almost everything that is connected to human life, e.g., employment, economy, communication, warfare, privacy, security, ethics, healthcare, etc. However, we are yet to see its evolution in the long term—whether it is leading humanity towards making this planet a better place to live in or a place which is full of disaster. Every technology has its advantages and disadvantages, but advantages always outweigh disadvantages for the technology to survive in the market. Nonetheless, for AI, we are not yet sure whether in the long term positive effects will always keep outweighing the negative effects, and if that is not the case, then we are in serious trouble. If we look around us, on the one hand, we seem to embrace the change being brought by technology, be it smart home, smart healthcare, Industry 4.0 or autonomous cars. On the other hand, we often find ourselves protesting against the government in the context of unemployment, taxes, privacy, etc. As AI development is speeding up, more robots or autonomous systems are being born and replacing human labor. This is the current situation; however, in the long term, results seem to get more interesting. This paper focuses on the major domains where human life is significantly affected by AI in both positive and negative ways.

It is important to first understand what Artificial Intelligence (AI) actually is. According to Oxford Dictionary (Oxford, 2016), AI is intelligence exhibited by machines. In computer science, an ideal ‘intelligent’ machine is a flexible rational agent that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of success at some goal. Thus, when a machine mimics a humanlike behavior, e.g., learning, planning, reasoning, problem-solving, the perception of the environment, natural language processing, etc., then it falls under the category of AI.

Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, says that AI could be leveraged to solve major challenges, including climate change, disease diagnosis, drug discovery, microeconomics, theorem proving and protein folding.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Law, Privacy, Employment, Singularity