AI doctor and personal assistant? What Canada might look like in 2050

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In 2050, artificial intelligence is no longer a new topic, it is seamlessly integrated into our daily lives.

At least experts believe so.

Open source intelligence like ChatGPT and Google Bard are giving ordinary people a glimpse of what the future holds, and the technology has made great strides in the last year.

AI has been touted as a way to solve many of the world’s problems, including healthcare, transportation, and infrastructure, but it has also raised questions about its effectiveness.

From avatars giving mental health advice to internet photos generated, AI has quickly permeated Canadian lives, but its future remains unknown.

CTVNews.ca asked three experts what AI will look like in 2050, including where AI will have the biggest impact and what Canada needs to do to prepare for it.

Today’s AI ‘tends to hallucinate’

“It’s actually incredibly difficult to predict this far ahead,” said Bered Schwartz, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia.

To understand what the future holds, Schwartz, who is also chairman of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Study (CIFAR), looked to the past.

“In 1996, the internet was new, you had to be connected to cable, Amazon started as an online bookstore, there was no Google, no video, no social media, no smartphones,” she said in an interview with CTVNews.ca. “Just given how much has changed since then, and the fact that things are moving faster now, it’s actually very hard to predict.”

But she says that if we understand how AI is progressing today, we can understand how the world will become more automated.

“I think[it]will become more ubiquitous and better in our lives,” she said. “At the moment there are a lot of restrictions, but I think many of them will be resolved.

Administrative and paper-intensive jobs, such as law, are likely to benefit from AI, Schwartz said. She envisions AI assisting lawyers by automating “routine tasks” such as drafting contracts, but says this is still a work in progress.

“The main problem today is with generative AI tools … they tend to hallucinate and make up details, so they are unreliable. That can be very problematic,” she said. said.

Recently, two US attorneys accused ChatGPT of adding fictitious details to legal investigations. They may be penalized by judges for filing lawsuits containing false case references.

Schwartz said AI could also help make it easier for people to learn new languages. For French and English, AI can enhance learning because of the abundance of resources on the internet.

“But if you look at indigenous languages ​​that don’t have a lot of written text on the web, standard solutions don’t really work well for those less resourced languages,” she said. . “So we need to do more research and come up with different solutions to really make it work, but AI definitely helps with that.”

Schwartz hopes AI will also be used to optimize public transportation, among other things.

“I don’t think flying cars will ever happen. I don’t think it’s necessarily an efficient solution. I think self-driving cars… will be more mature,” she said. “I sincerely hope that in 2050 we will not be stuck in traffic jams yet.”

The future of customer service

While Schwartz envisions a more automated world, McGill University professor and Microsoft Research consultant Jackie Chan envisions more avatars assisting humans.

“There are already many startups and companies working on that kind of (avatar) application using some kind of generative AI technology,” Cheung, who is also CIFAR chairman, said in an interview with CTVNews.ca.

He believes that “in the not too distant future” people will be interacting with avatars in grocery stores, banks and restaurants.

“In the short term, I think full automation is probably a mistake in terms of consumer experience and its impact on daily life,” Cheung said. “As the system improves, there are some situations where it will probably be better than it is now.”

One area where Cheung could benefit from AI is the airline industry, where technology can provide customer service, but the potential for AI avatars to provoke emotional reactions in humans, which we believe is He said it may not be possible to explain.

“It can cause a great deal of emotional distress to those who interact and bond with these systems,” he said. “There are a lot of long-term implications that we don’t really think about.”

Some areas of our lives are already permeated by AI, such as Internet search queries being presented as choices, Cheung said.

A question-based method of searching for and receiving specific examples is one of the ways Cheung believes AI will help customer service in the future.

“We’re not going to start using it at full capacity anytime soon,” he said. “It will take time to figure out what is most useful and what is less useful.”

DR.AI

CIFAR chairman Rahul Krishnan said in an interview with CTVNews.ca that searches for survey results could also be done by an AI personal assistant.

Professor Krishnan of the University of Toronto said, “Once we have a large, multimodal model that we can personalize, we can create highly interactive chatbots out of it that can help us in many different ways. ,” said the Vector Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a professor at the University of Toronto.

Krishnan wants to go on a hiking trip and ask his personal assistant to plan what he needs.

In your head, your assistant can order groceries with approval, remind you of appointments, and even schedule meetings.

“This is my imagination for 2050, but I doubt it will come much sooner than that,” he said.

Krishnan focuses on AI machine learning, which is how technology learns and implements ideas. One way he thinks AI could change Canada is through healthcare.

“It’s going to change medicine because I think it’s just a very big heterogeneous system,” he said. “By making small, incremental improvements over time, we will go from where we are today to where clinicians can spend much more time with their patients than they currently spend in front of a computer. ”

A new report from January detailed how Canadian doctors spend 18.5 million hours on “unnecessary” paperwork, which Krishnan said ultimately gave to AI. I think there is a possibility that

The technology could help doctors take detailed patient notes and summarize long clinical histories.

Krishnan said AI could also help doctors spot problems in their patients.

“Imagine a pathologist looking at a very large image and trying to identify abnormalities in cells,” he says. “The work on this image is not done by him alone, but by him operating an AI-assisted device that has been trained on millions of other images, so what would take hours can now be reduced to 30 minutes. May be shortened image.”

The technology has solutions that will assist humans in ways many experts cannot predict possible today, but Krishnan says AI is a step forward.

“We as a society have chosen to explore to ensure the future continues to evolve in ways that are beneficial to all,” he said.