Expert shares what the future holds for Artificial Intelligence

As artificial intelligence technology is on the rise, Apple is tapping into the power of ChatGPT to infuse its products with artificial intelligence. This will be part of the iOS 18 update coming this fall. The tech giant says AI can help users seek information, answer questions, and enhance their writing. It can also be used to enhance photos and videos. But AI has been controversial. Here with more information is computer science professor at the University of Toronto, Steve Engels. Steve, this is your area of expertise, so break this down for us. How do you see the new Apple updates impacting the user experience? Well, up to this point, all the voice assistants that have been put out by Apple and Google and Amazon have been really good at interacting with their systems, right? Able to look up, you know, your photos, able to look up some basic information from the web. But it hasn't been able to go too far beyond that. You know, I've always been limited by, you know, what was kind of easily searchable. But with Chanchi, PT even now have the ability to ask more nuanced questions, to be able to get access to more information and to be able to get it to produce more creative results. And so this is going to be a great benefit for people who want or feel like their current voice assistance are a little bit limiting. Well, a lot of people feel uncomfortable when they think of AI. They think, you know, it can be a little bit invasive. Do you see there being any ethical issues with this new technology? There's always a bit of a concern, especially with things like privacy. Now that we're using ChatGPT with things like Siri, it means that some of the requests that you're given are not just going to be held by Apple, but they actually get access to open AI as well. And so people are concerned about what kind of information they're going to be sharing in the use of these devices. But that's nothing new, right? We've been using a lot of free software, which, you know, we accept a certain amount of oversect that we're giving up a certain amount of privacy in order to be able to use them. In terms of the ethics behind it, it also depends on how much you're willing to trust these things to be able to do certain tasks. Being accusing some of these AI systems without giving the proper oversight to it is always going to be complicated because we can't afford to trust AI completely without at least giving a a certain look over the the results that he gives. OK, keeping the discussion of AI going. This week McDonald's in the US announced it's ending its test run at AI powered Dr. Thrus after multiple mix UPS. It was adding unnecessary items to orders, giving people the wrong orders. So we're seeing that AI is flawed, but at one point a lot of people were worried that AI would take jobs away from humans. Are we starting to see this go back in the other direction a little bit? I mean, with any kind of new AI technology, there is this, this first impulse to start thinking of it as, you know, taking over everything. And while AI is able to do a lot of human tasks, especially some cognitive ones, it's never able to replace humans completely. What it's meant to do is it's meant to provide an assistant, right? So it can help maybe replace a large team of people with one or two AIS. But in the end, it still requires human oversight. You still need to take the results and look over them and be able to understand whether it produced the right results or not, and then be able to change the results if you need to. OK, Speaking of jobs, we have a story on our website right now about how artificial intelligence is helping a farm in Ontario optimize aspects like lighting, irrigation and harvest timing. How does AI benefit farming? Oh, I mean, we have people who are working on that stuff too. The idea is that there's a lot of tasks that happen on a farm that could be automated and being able to learn and understand the farmers patterns now is no different from say your AI powers thermostat learning. You know what patterns you like to turn on or off your heat. And So what this can do is that it can take some of these patterns and learn them and then be able to reproduce them when it comes to say like the lighting inside the greenhouse. Or you can actually use it for things like harvesting your field. You know, the same way that, like, a Roomba would vacuum your house, All the things that we use in our daily lives can be applied on a large scale to things like farming to help automate some of the stuff that doesn't require, like, humans to be able to go over and, you know, monitor it personally. OK, Steve, thank you so much for breaking this down for us. That is Steve Angles, computer Sciences at the University of Toronto. Thank you. Thank you.