Artificial intelligence is a supercharger for humanity, where people’s time and energy can be freed up to solve problems that require sophisticated strategies. (Getty Images)
TThe world that we know, along with the history of all areas of knowledge and boundaries, has been governed by long-held beliefs, evidence-based information and evidence/tested theories, through rigorous research and innovation. Before the dot-com bubble, expertise and knowledge was found (or formulated) through hours, days, weeks, months and years of reading, listening and searching through archives or available materials and artifacts.
Over the past 25 years, we have realized (through epistemology, ontology and axiology) that we live in a knowledge-rich age where anything, anywhere, can be obtained online. Of course, we continue to ask questions and/or verify what we find online. However, if we have the opportunity to search for a large number of sources of information, it allows us to bring the material closer and faster.
Enter the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
This will not be another post on ChatGPT, because ChatGPT is just one example of the great potential that AI brings to society. However, this article aims to distinguish the opportunities, constraints, uses and perspectives of AI. And how AI will never replace human expertise (in a skill-driven sector).
This will be given through six Eskus:
Esignificantly, Eextension, Eadditional, Eempowerment, Ethics and Eeducation.
Context (Let me start by setting the scene…)
Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, a skilled and experienced pilot, landed his plane in the Hudson River after a bird strike killed one of the engines. Today, many people bow down and are surprised. Not because any passengers died (thankfully there were no fatalities), but because the pilot had the intuition to land the plane (of all places) in the river. This real incident was captured in the epic movie ‘Sully’, with Tom Hanks in the lead role.
When the tension ended, a commission of inquiry was held by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to determine (through computer simulations) whether Sully would be able to turn the plane and successfully land on one of the landing strips at a nearby airport. All the simulations showed that the plane was able to enter one of the landing strips, without hitting any buildings or objects (despite flying at a lower than normal terrain).
However, when calculating the human factor, without time to react to the situation, all simulations show that the plane will hit any building or object. As Sully said, the key here is the human factor. Computer simulations lack the real pressure, anxiety and “reality” of a real situation. Those who run the simulation know what steps to take after the bird attack.
In a real-life scenario, Sully and his co-pilot don’t know what to do immediately – they have to interpret the risks and make a calculated decision about their next move. A few extra seconds can make the difference between life or death. When the situation demands, coupled with skills and expertise, human expertise is generally viewed.
Theory of Expertise
Expertise Theory shows how skills and talents develop and emerge from time, practice and repetition through experiential learning, strategies, knowledge and application. It records how an individual becomes an expert in a domain or field – through the process of cognitive task analysis – and describes the skills and expertise required more powerfully, effectively and efficiently than novices.
Metacognition
Metacognition is the ability to think about one’s own thoughts; and is built on several cognitive markers such as self-awareness, self-regulation, self-reflection, imagery, goal setting and goal evaluation, learning and skills. Unless AI (and robots) will be programmed through a set of advanced cognitive skills, human expertise will continue to prevail in problem solving and effective strategies to solve many of the world’s problems, including the sustainable development goals (SDGs).
- Activate it
AI allows us to make sense of vast amounts of data. Through this high level of understanding, it provides a variety of ways to enable tasks and activities for various professions and expertise. For example, the company has started innovating smart glasses for deaf people that can read (through augmentation) what they hear people say, through speech-to-text. This allows deaf people to better understand people who do not understand sign language and reduces the need to read lips. This kind of enablement would be akin to real-time language translation or providing complex and accurate biomedical engineering design for amputees requiring prosthetics.
Another way for AI to optimize its capabilities for humans is through collaboration. AI-based dashboards can be used to bring together the skills and interests of individuals and/or organizations. To ensure a better fit or collaborative pursuit, the dashboard can suggest collaboration possibilities, with almost no limits, in the context of the show economy and internationalization.
Considering the examples listed above, the use of AI still needs to be led, developed, designed and managed by human work with inter-disciplinary expertise (starting from hard and soft skills), to activate the various capabilities of human work.
- Extension
In the context of health care, it is predicted that there will be a shortage of thousands of health professionals in 2030. AI has been identified as a potential solution to remove arbitrary or malicious tasks and save time and effort of health professionals, so that health professionals can consult with other patients.
In this context, AI can help with indirect tasks (such as health administration, patient records, systems for early warning signs, surgical theater orders, joint management of all patients in a ward or ICU in a specialized database of health professionals or mobile apps), so that professionals healthcare can devote more energy and time to directing medical-related tasks that only require the expertise of trained and skilled people. We have witnessed the potential of robotics to assist in surgery, but skilled people will lead the treatment, surgery or program. AI will not replace healthcare professionals.
Of course, there are other professions and jobs that need to be studied to determine whether AI might be at risk of replacing people. In summary, only jobs that involve repetitive tasks, redundancy, confusion or lack of adaptation will have a higher risk of being replaced by AI. For professions and jobs that require flexibility, adaptability, critical thinking and applied skills of a higher order, human expertise remains.
In short, AI can augment human expertise with predictive models, automate tasks, make decisions easier and analyze vast amounts of data.
- Improvement
AI can also improve what humans do. For example, in the cooking industry, thousands of recipes for a certain dish can be summarized by AI and the recipe can be designed to improve the quality of the dish that tastes and looks better. This will improve the skills of any chef or cook, regardless of years of experience in the kitchen.
A robot chef can certainly follow a recipe, but a human chef will be the key to overseeing the process, which is very different from an automated manufacturing or production process. The same approach can be used in agriculture to optimize farming methods and reduce risk and exposure to pesticides. AI improvements allow us to improve the quality or value of something or improve the quality of a system or process. With these improvements, the human touch will still weigh more than AI.
- Empowerment
AI will be in an important position to support the capabilities of others by empowering them through better insights, skills and training. This can be done by providing and facilitating continuous and customized learning that suits the individual’s abilities and circumstances. It can also enable individuals to learn quickly and achieve better and measurable results, in their domain or field of expertise. Furthermore, AI can empower financial analysts to make better decisions by sourcing patterns, trends and predictive models that can be measured and visualized in financial markets. Much like the taking the horse to water analogy (without giving him a drink), when AI empowers humans, they can do better.
- Ethics
There is a lot of information and reflection on the ethical foundations of AI and what it means in many industries. My prediction is that AI will only get smarter and more sophisticated. For example, we may see a more adaptable version of robotics applied in many sectors.
Some movies and television series such as iRobot and Better Than Us explores the fictionally based abilities we can experience with robots.
There will come a time when robots will also have the ability to think and act, like humans (with minimal emotional connection). In this applied context, it raises some questions about who is at fault if a robot takes its own independence, causing harm to humans or the environment. For example, a child crosses the street, and instead of the car automatically stopping or releasing the emergency brake to avoid colliding with the child, it drives and hits the child (without fault or programming error, but on purpose).
The main question is: who is at fault here, the robot, the human who has programmed the robot or the company that sells/distributes the robot? Indeed (and hopefully), humans have designed robots to serve or benefit society. But robots make decisions about what to do at that moment, through an independent process, is the human programmer or company still wrong?
These examples should be governed by strong laws, robot constitutions, regulations, laws and intellectual property (including copyright) for interactions between humans and machines/robots. Eventually, there may come a time when robots can replace certain human activities. However, it is possible that they still lack emotional intelligence and difficulty managing decisions and activities. Importantly, empathy and human touch remain key to understanding human emotions and behavior (as well as behavior change).
- Education
From an educational perspective, there is a lot of content about the advantages and disadvantages of AI (as well as ChatGPT) and the implications that it can lead to a reduction in the ability to think critically and also to the risk of increasing plagiarism and reducing academic integrity. . However, like any other tool, technology or process that develops in society, there are solutions to mitigate these risks or concerns. For example: diversification of assessment pedagogy to combat the need for student plagiarism or optimizing academic journal submissions to prevent researchers from jeopardizing their integrity. On the contrary, instead of putting contingencies in place for that, there has been a request for educators to also look at this through an optimistic lens, where technology can actually improve and facilitate the learning process better.
Summary
AI has proven to be a supercharger for humans, where more time and energy can be freed up for humans, so that they can be used to uniquely solve various problems that require advanced strategies and reduce the possibility of performing repetitive or redundant daily tasks. AI remains the X-factor to improve human expertise, and through the 6 E’s, X’plained why AI will not replace human expertise.
This paper was not written by ChatGPT.
Habib Noorbhai is a professor (Health & Sports Sciences) and director at the Biomedical Engineering & Healthcare Technology (BEAHT) Research Centre, University of Johannesburg.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect official policy or position Mail & Guardians.