The chapter of 2020 has quietly turned over, allowing many to breathe a little easier. But the year that has just passed is destined to be remembered as a turning point in history.
“Epidemic” and “digitization” are of course the two most important keywords in 2020. They influence and interact with each other. On the one hand, the large-scale application of digital technology is conducive to epidemic prevention and control. On the other hand, the epidemic has accelerated the digital transformation of the whole society. What used to be superficial digitization is being replaced by a deep digital transformation that is irreversible.
The irreversible tide of digitalization is increasingly having a fundamental impact on society and individuals. To the society, it has brought digitalization of infrastructure, social governance and mode of production. For individuals, it brings digitalization of the way we work and the way we live.
In the great uncertainty of the future, only digitization is certain.
The digitalization of work and life means that people’s work and life are moving more and more online, integrating with the digital virtual world. Perhaps for everyone, this will have both positive and negative effects.
On the positive side, digitalization has narrowed the distance between people in terms of information and made people’s communication and collaboration more efficient. It also breaks the time and space limitation to a certain extent, making everyone’s life and work more convenient; By making information and knowledge more accessible, we can further reduce inequality in education and knowledge. Empowering the health industry can also make medical and healthcare services more accessible to users.
As digitalization becomes more and more deeply integrated with our life and work, some changes beyond what we had imagined are beginning to emerge, making our life and work, in many cases, more convenient and efficient.
But on the negative side, surrounded by powerful algorithms, data privacy no longer exists, so that everyone is always exposed to the threat of information risk; At the same time, criminals are also using digital technology to carry out various illegal and criminal activities, including fraud; And the excessive dependence on electronic devices has increasingly begun to affect people’s physical and mental health, especially to the healthy growth of teenagers bring a great threat; What’s more, it’s not just the very young and the very old. The deluge of information and shorter response times has reached universal physiological limits, leaving many people at a loss to cope with the onslaught of information.
Living and working digitally is undoubtedly convenient and efficient, but the barriers between the real and virtual worlds are rapidly breaking down, and people need enough time to adapt to such changes.
While the way we live and work is rapidly being digitally transformed, the digital transformation of society is further accelerating, and the popularity and application of a new generation of digital technologies, represented by ARTIFICIAL intelligence, cloud computing and the Internet of Things, is also accelerating. In particular, artificial intelligence, the technology industry’s favorite technology, is infiltrating every aspect of society at an unimaginable speed.
In the past, artificial intelligence technology has been quietly integrated into our work and life in virtual assistants, word recognition, image optimization and other everyday applications that can be seen everywhere. At present, in the upsurge of industrial intelligence, artificial intelligence has been integrated into various industries with impressive efficiency, profoundly changing the face of all walks of life. Most of these changes are welcome, but there are some concerns.
Fortunately, the industrialization and popularization of artificial intelligence can greatly improve the operation efficiency of the digital economy and become the accelerating engine of social digitalization. On the one hand, the industrial application of ARTIFICIAL intelligence can open up new industries and markets. It can be foreseen that unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous driving, intelligent speakers… New “tracks” powered by ARTIFICIAL intelligence will continue to emerge; On the other hand, the integration of ARTIFICIAL intelligence and traditional industries will greatly promote the optimization and upgrading of traditional industries. The integration of finance, medical care, energy and OTHER industries with AI will significantly improve the efficiency of their respective industries.
It is worth worrying that the accelerated application of artificial intelligence will also bring more and more challenges to the employment situation. Take the manufacturing industry as an example. At the beginning of 2020, due to the impact of the epidemic, many manufacturing enterprises faced a labor shortage that threatened their survival, so some enterprises had to accelerate intelligent transformation. Approaching the end of 2020, Yue Jiang Science and Technology developed the MG400, which greatly reduced the threshold of intelligent transformation of small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises. In terms of cost and efficiency, artificial intelligence is inevitable to replace human in simple, repetitive and standard work.
Rising efficiency and shrinking employment are likely to be the two sides of an intelligent industrial transformation. How to grasp the balance between the two and resolve the contradiction is the key problem facing the further integration of artificial intelligence and industry.
In fact, the accelerating popularization of artificial intelligence will not only bring a certain test to the employment situation, but also the impact on all aspects of society will be more and more obvious.
The rapidly developing AI technology is still not out of the category of “weak AI era”, but AI can do a lot of things in the era of weak AI. In specific applications, ARTIFICIAL intelligence has achieved a leap from “replacing human beings” to “surpassing human beings” in some vertical fields. The tide of technological development cannot be stopped. We must adapt to it as best we can, which requires efforts from both human and ARTIFICIAL intelligence.
From the perspective of AI companies, social ethics that are compatible with AI technology are needed. In fact, many research institutions and enterprises have begun to pay more attention to AI ethics, or carry out relevant research, or strengthen self-discipline, and are trying to explore the corresponding social ethics adapted to AI technology. Among them, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, Fudan University and other universities and research institutions have carried out AI ethics related research; Megvii has established the first AI governance committee among AI startups — the Ethics Committee of Megvii AI.
From the perspective of the general public, the development and application of AI technology cannot be divorced from the main line of people-oriented. The purpose of the birth of any science and technology is to serve the human beings who created it, and AI technology is no exception. So the application of AI should enhance and empower human beings, not become or replace human beings.
In 2020, with the acceleration of the digital transformation of society, the industrial application of artificial intelligence technology starts a boom. Faced with unprecedented opportunities and challenges, all individuals and organizations need to stand on the new stage of development and embrace the new era of AI’s comprehensive restructuring with new ideas and thinking. The tide of scientific and technological innovation is unstoppable. If we take the lead in adapting to the new changes, we may get the first opportunity. However, if we are slow or stubborn, we will eventually be eliminated by the tide of The Times.