What are the advantages and disadvantages of artificial intelligence (AI)?

Everyone knows that AI gives businesses an edge. The Appen State of AI Report for 2021 says that all businesses have a critical need to adopt AI and ML in their models or risk being left behind. Companies increasingly utilize AI to streamline their internal processes (as well as some customer-facing processes and applications). Implementing AI can help your business achieve its results faster and with more precision.

The first major advantage of implementing AI is that it decreases human error, as well as risk to humans.

“To err is human…” - Alexander Pope, Enlightenment poet.

Everyone makes mistakes on occasion. That’s not always a bad thing, but when it comes to producing consistent results, it certainly can be. Using AI—particularly AI agents —to complete tasks, especially repetitive ones, can prevent human error from tainting an otherwise perfectly useful product or service.

Similarly, using AI to complete particularly difficult or dangerous tasks can help prevent the risk of injury or harm to humans. An example of AI taking risks in place of humans would be robots being used in areas with high radiation. Humans can get seriously sick or die from radiation, but the robots would be unaffected. And if a fatal error were to occur, the robot could be built again.

AI programs are available at all times, whereas humans work 8 hours a day. Machines can work all through the day and night, and AI-powered chatbots can provide customer service even during off-hours. This can help companies to produce more and provide a better customer experience than humans could provide alone.

Humans disagree and allow their biases to leak through in their decisions all the time. All humans have biases, and even if we try and solve for them, they sometimes manage to sneak through the cracks.

On the other hand, provided the AI algorithm has been trained using unbiased datasets and tested for programming bias, the program will be able to make decisions without the influence of bias. That can help provide more equity in things like selecting job applications, approving loans, or credit applications.

Though if the AI was created using biased datasets or training data it can make biased decisions that aren’t caught because people assume the decisions are unbiased. That’s why quality checks are essential on the training data, as well as the results that a specific AI program produces to ensure that bias issues aren’t overlooked.

Even the most interesting job in the world has its share of mundane or repetitive work. This could be things like entering and analyzing data, generating reports, verifying information, and the like. Using an AI program can save humans from the boredom of repetitive tasks, and save their energy for work that requires more creative energy.

As we addressed above, AI can work around the clock, creating more value in the same day as a human worker. And since AI can help to take over manual and tedious tasks, it frees up workers for higher-skilled tasks. That, ultimately, creates more value for the end-user or consumer.

The biggest and most obvious drawback of implementing AI is that its development can be extremely costly. Depending on what exactly you need AI to do, the cost changes. One estimate says that the cost for a fully implemented AI solution for most businesses ranged from $20,000 to well in the millions.

The cost balances out later on down the line once the AI is fully implemented and can help streamline the workflow. But the up-front cost can be intimidating, if not prohibitive.

The next disadvantage of AI is that it lacks the human ability to use emotion and creativity in decisions.

The lack of creativity means AI can’t create new solutions to problems or excel in any overly artistic field. One scientific paper posited that at the present stage of AI development, it can be programmed to create “novel” ideas, but not original ones. This paper posits that until AI can create original and unexpected ideas, it won’t overtake humans in the ability to be creative, which means it will be hindered in its decision-making. If a company is looking for a new or creative solution to a problem, humans are better capable of providing that solution.

When making sensitive decisions, humans inherently consider the emotional ramifications. AI doesn’t have that ability, making only the most optimal decision based on the parameters with which it has been provided, regardless of the emotional impact. Even AI that has been programmed to read and understand human emotion falls short.

In this study , the AI more often assigned negative emotions to people of races other than white. This would mean that an AI tasked with making decisions based on this data would give racially biased results that further increase inequality.

Compassion and kindness are both inherently human traits, but cannot be programmed into even the best AI.

This may not be as obvious of a downside as the ones cited above. But machines generally degrade over time. For example, if AI is installed into a machine on an assembly line, eventually the parts of the machine will start to wear. And unless the AI has a self-repairing function, it will eventually break.

Likewise, the AI itself can become outdated if not trained to learn and regularly evaluated by human data scientists. The model and training data used to create the AI will eventually be old and outdated, meaning that the AI trained will also be unless retrained or programmed to learn and improve on its own.

Similarly to the point above, AI can’t naturally learn from its own experience and mistakes. Humans do this by nature, trying not to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. However, creating an AI that can learn on its own is both extremely difficult and quite expensive. There are AIs that can learn, of course. Perhaps the most notable example of this would be the program AlphaGo, developed by Google, which taught itself to play Go and within three days started inventing new strategies that humans hadn’t yet thought of.

But without the programming to learn on its own, AI will need human intervention to help it improve over time.

This is yet another disadvantage many people know immediately, thanks to many headlines over the years. As AI becomes more commonplace at companies, it may decrease available jobs, since AI can easily handle repetitive tasks that were previously done by workers.

Now, many reports show that AI will likely create just as many new jobs as it makes obsolete , if not more. But then you run into the problem of having to train humans on these new jobs, or leaving workers behind with the surge in technology.