Our Chicago: Artificial intelligence in our everyday lives
CHICAGO (WLS) -- Artificial intelligence is likely operating in the background of your daily life.
At home, in your car, in the workplace, at school, AI is there. But as you encounter it, do you really understand what it is, what it can do and how you might want to use it in your life?
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"A.I., artificial intelligence, is a computer system that has been created to do a lot of what humans do. Do things like evaluate patterns, read, write and generally be able to communicate in a way that is truly, uniquely human and belongs to us," says Vikas Srinath, the co-founder and co-host of Prompt: AI Innovation Series, which kicks off Tech Week Chicago on July 20.
He says AI has been around for decades but became mainstream in 2022 thanks to ChatGPT. As for where it shows up in our everyday lives, Srinath says much of AI is invisible.
It's your cell phone, "In the coffee shop that might look like the app that you use to order, the sort of supply chain of coffee that the coffee shops use to predict what it is you might order based on hundreds of customers that come in," Srinath said.
Srinath says there are ways to use AI to make our lives easier, and that includes things we do around the house.
"So one of the best things I do, usually every Tuesday or Thursday, is take a picture of my fridge, have AI identify all the different ingredients I have, understand that I'm a vegetarian, have been all my life, and give me something that within 30 minutes I can prepare with just the ingredients that I have," Srinath said.
Students may also use AI, and Srinath says are ways to incorporate it without violating ethical standards.
"Obviously, students having the ability to learn, through school, with interactions with teachers, other students, is super important. There is something about AI that is an entirely individual endeavor. It's just you and a chatbot, but without the collaboration with your peers that can be a very one-sided, almost like an echo chamber. So in some ways, when we think about how kids can really use AI today, we think about it as kind of a collaborative exercise. 'How do families use AI today? How can kids work with their parents to evaluate what an input looks like to create a prompt to identify how you can learn about something, and then test it with one another?'" Srinath said.
He says using AI can help parents to better understand their child's homework, so they can then explain it to that child "in a way that allows them to not only be able to use that knowledge for themselves but also collaborate with their peers."
When it comes to the workplace, the message has often been that AI is going to take a lot of jobs.
"What I'm seeing, certainly as a lawyer, one of the most high risk jobs for automation in AI, it's just changing the way that we work. It's enabling us as lawyers to know so much more about the context that we would give to a client. It's allowing clients to become so much more educated and ask us the questions they really want to ask us. I think about that in so many other contexts. We want ourselves to be educated. We want to know the most about a certain subject before we go see our doctor. So, it's really important we have the skills that can really apply across different types of AI technology to be able to enable that conversation, in a way that we didn't before," Srinath said.
For more on Prompt: AI Innovation Series, click here.
