Advanced Technology Outcomes: Human vs Machine or Human with Machine?

Watch out for the game human vs machine as an outcome of digital transformation

The development of technology is providing a whole new advanced way to lead our lives in an improved way, to better respond to a world at a rapid pace. From the beginning of human life, humans have designed machines for help, and today what we can see is a fast acceleration of this process. There is no longer the need to transfer human knowledge into machines because now machines are constructed which can learn on their own just by observing humans, making sense out of big data, and watching expressions. Is this resulting in human vs machine?

Artificial Intelligence is moving forward significantly in terms of its applicability. Today, AI can perform to an extended level because of the processing power which is cheap, abundant, and pervasive. This, along with ubiquitous communications, and sensors and storage capabilities, has led to an inflection point in the availability of data. This has twofold consequences, the data space is huge, and therefore it is beyond human understanding, on the other hand, it is fuelling machines' capabilities, intelligence, and continuous learning.

This process has just started. Machines are continuously evolving and the old ones are upgrading, thus, likely to outshine humans in a growing number of areas.

There is no doubt that we humans have always benefited from machines and also that we have the power to turn them off when required. But now the situation has turned around. The increasing issue is the vital role played by machines both as a single unit and collectively as infrastructures. This means humans no longer have the option to shut the machines off.

In the health sector as well machines are evolving at a faster rate. Surgery is becoming robotized and medical diagnostics has become dependent on machines. Even there are automated machines that are manufacturing drugs. Therefore, pulling the plug off will result in terrible consequences for thousands of people worldwide.

Besides all this, we are making use of machines as an extension of ourselves and applying them as stronger, faster, and cheaper hands. And, because of this, we still win over the machines but it is on us to make accurate decisions for the upcoming future.

We are continuously getting engaged with machines. We use smartphones to show routes, to reach a destination, to look for recipes, even we use smartphones to check our health and the list is increasing rapidly.

As long as we are on the winning side, extending the sphere of knowledge by using machines as an instrument is a great idea. But it is important to understand that we are still in control of creating intelligent machines. If not, then there is a lot to lose. Humans are losing jobs as machines are taking over many areas, and this is not surprising. Machines perform better than humans do at certain things.

The digital transformation has the potential to make things even worse. Under the industrial revolution, machines stepped in to take human jobs, and it was all about automation. But with the digital revolution, jobs aren't being replaced by machines, they're simply vanishing.

AI has the potential to replace humans or more critically it is efficient to make humans needless. A world pervaded by machines performing in the knowledge space, a world customized for machines, is quite different from the one we know now.

We have already reached a turning point where humans alone can no longer be able to extricate all potential value from cyberspace. This can be done only with the use of machines. For machines to be able to do that, they need to be better than us. So, we're already in that difficult situation.

It is up to us how we control machines and to what extent we do that. If we use humans with machines then things become defensible. There is no one to lose when machines and humans work together.