How will artificial intelligence affect our lives in the 2050s?

The new book by University of Oulu professor emeritus Matti Pietikäinen and professor Olli Silvén deals with how artificial intelligence changes us and the world.
Oulun yliopiston emeritusprofessorin Matti Pietikäisen ja professori Olli Silvénin uusi yleistajuinen teos käsittelee sitä, miten tekoäly muuttaa meitä ja maailmaa.

Artificial intelligence has become a part of everyday conversation and our lives. It is considered a new electricity that is revolutionizing the world. Artificial intelligence is heavily invested in both industry and research. Technology leaders in artificial intelligence are growing and their dominant position is already causing concern. The United States has been a leading country in both research and application of artificial intelligence, but China, which invests enormously in the topic, is expected to overtake it, perhaps in the next few years. It is feared that artificial intelligence will take a lot of jobs and it is even believed that in the next few years or ten it will turn into super artificial intelligence smarter than humans — taking the power from mankind.

However, there is also a lot of hype in the current AI debate. Artificial intelligence is often talked about in a context that is not actual artificial intelligence, but regular evolution of digital technology towards more advanced functionalities. Combining different technologies enables the development of completely new types of applications that imitate intelligent activity, a futuristic example being humanoid robots that resemble humans. Artificial intelligence based on so-called deep learning has achieved impressive results in many problems, but its limits are already visible. Subjects related to artificial intelligence have been studied since the 1940s, and the field has already seen many ups and downs due to excessive expectations and related disappointments. All current solutions represent the so-called weak artificial intelligence.

“The purpose of this book is to give a realistic picture of artificial intelligence, its current state, possibilities and limitations. The book complements and is a forward-looking continuation of the book we published at the end of 2021 “The challenges of artificial intelligence — From machine learning and machine vision to emotional artificial intelligence”. At first, we present what artificial intelligence is and how it has developed, and what applications have been reached so far. The topics include the representation methods of artificial intelligence, learning and machine vision”, the profeossors Matti Pietikäinen and Olli Silvén say and they continue:

“We will look at how artificial intelligence research has tackled new challenges in order to get closer to strong artificial intelligence that resembles human intelligence. In this context we examine how the technology and approaches of artificial intelligence will change in the coming decades. We believe that AI is a human assistant — not a ruler.”

In recent months, the easy-to-use ChatGPT developed by Open AI has attracted a lot of attention. It has capability to dialogue, summarizing longer texts, responding to questions, and is even able to creat a birthday poem. However, its limitations are easy to see. ChatGPT is addressed in Chapters 9–10.

“We predict how artificial intelligence will change our society, people’s professions and hobbies by the 2050s. The points of view of the treatment include the expected changes in everyday life, hobbies, working life, teaching and learning, and tourism.”


Download the book for free from this link.

Last updated: 17.5.2023