Artificial intelligence may be revolutionary, but it has its limits: What AI can’t do is particularly evident in what makes humans and living beings in general.
What AI can’t do: Fundamental limits of artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence, or AI for short, is on everyone’s lips and is often praised as a panacea for a wide range of challenges. But despite remarkable progress, there are areas in which AI is still inferior to human intelligence and abilities.
- The creativity of AI is limited, because although it can recognize patterns and build on them, it has only limited ability to perform genuine creative acts that create something new. However, this is currently changing in the context of generative AI, in the development of which artificial intelligence is quite capable of creating new content, for example in art and music.
- Emotional understanding and empathy are human abilities that AI cannot replicate because it lacks awareness of emotions.
- AI systems require large amounts of data to learn and are not able to deliver reliable results without this data. Depending on how up to date a topic is, it is also possible that AI will distribute information that does not correspond to the latest human knowledge.
- The ability to think and act outside of predetermined parameters is not a characteristic of AI systems. They find it difficult to react to new and unexpected situations because they rely on predefined scenarios.
Practical hurdles for artificial intelligence
In addition to fundamental limitations, there are also practical hurdles that AI cannot yet overcome. These relate, among other things, to integrating AI into existing systems and processes and applying it there.
- In particular, integrating AI into existing systems that were not designed to use AI is a challenge.
- AI systems are dependent on the programmed algorithms, which means that they cannot react flexibly to unforeseeable events.
- In industry and production, AI can make the human workplace disputed or redundant. Of course, this has both economic and social implications that not everyone welcomes.
- Without humans, AI cannot yet develop further. But even though AI can already take on many tasks, there are deficiencies in communication. This is where AI reaches its limits, because, for example, it can process natural language, but it can only grasp the subtleties of human dialogue, such as irony or sarcasm, with difficulty.
- AI systems can learn, but they lack an understanding of the significance and consequences of their actions. Furthermore, since AI is incapable of emotional bonds, it is unable to build trust and cultivate human relationships.
- Data protection and ethical concerns are also slowing down the development and application of AI in sensitive areas such as medicine or human resources.
Ethical aspects of AI
The ethical implications of using AI also require intensive discussion and consideration. AI cannot make ethical decisions independently, which is why it becomes problematic to apply it in certain areas.
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- It is often unclear who is responsible for the decisions made by AI systems, which raises legal and ethical questions.
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- AI systems can reflect prejudices and discrimination present in the training data and thus intensify existing problems and conflicts.
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- In critical situations, making decisions about AI, such as in autonomous driving or medicine, requires ethical guidelines that have yet to be developed. Also, AI decisions are not always particularly transparent, since the algorithms often act as “black boxes” whose functioning outsiders cannot comprehend.
