“I need to know how Skynet gets built, who is responsible.”
In the Terminator movies, Skynet is created as a military defense system that eventually becomes self-aware and poses a threat to humanity. But to me, Hollywood is responsible for our current fear related to artificial intelligence, or AI, when there's really nothing to fear at all.
Hollywood has always played a significant role in shaping public perceptions and fears. We as humans have an undeniable curiosity about the future and movies like "Terminator," "The Matrix" or "Her" tap into our basic feelings about survival, our fears, and even our ethics or heroic desires.
Sci-fi often presents a future world that has been dramatically devastated by advanced technology or AI. Indeed, AI is rapidly evolving, and most people don't fully understand it yet, which leads to fear.
But should we really fear AI? My answer is no; it is a technology, a tool created and controlled by humans. Its impact on society depends on how it is developed, deployed and regulated. Nonetheless, fear is not rational.
AI is “just” a broad field of computer science that focuses on creating systems or machines that simulate human intelligence. "Simulate" is the key word here. Before, engineers had to teach computers to do everything. Now, engineers build systems that enable computers to learn on their own, but there is always a human mind behind the programming.
Here's a quick rundown of the three main types of AI categories:
- Narrow, or Weak AI, solves problems and helps with responses or commands for single tasks.
- General, or Strong AI, acts rationally and simulates human cognitive capabilities.
- Super AI outperforms human intelligence. This one is totally hypothetical; it doesn’t exist but it is the one that feeds our fears. This is the stuff of Hollywood plots — it's sci-fi and so far away from getting anywhere close to us, if that's even possible.
Narrow and general AI are the present. They represent where we are today and in these categories, we can find some other types of AI, including "no memory" and "limited memory."
More on those:
- No Memory, or Reactive AI, operates purely in the present moment like language translation or spell-checks, things we have been using for many years and have helped us save time in our daily tasks.
- Limited Memory AI focuses on specific information relevant to the particular task it’s solving. This mimics how our human brain works. An example here is self-driving cars because there are several things involved in driving like the road condition, the weather and other cars (for their speed, direction and proximity).
- A third type, Generative AI (GenAI), is capable of generating texts or media.
In addition to all of the above, there are many acronyms and names being used that are part of the AI world. But it's important to first understand the basics. Here are some examples to help understand some real-life applications, though these are not the only applications:
- Machine Learning (ML) can automatically adapt with minimal human interference, frequently used for predictive analytics.
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) for translation, spell check, text classification or sentiment analysis.
- Deep Learning (DL) is a large machine learning model that uses artificial deep neural networks to mimic the learning process of the human brain, frequently used for virtual assistants, chatbots or self-driving cars.
- Large Language Model (LLM) machine learning model, i.e. voice assistant (Alexa or Siri), the popular ChatGPT, or Generative AI.
Now that we understand the beauty of AI, the only thing to fear is fear itself.
We need to learn from the past. The previous industrial revolutions predicted mass job losses and I am sure at the time, people stood against technology. But history can tell us what really happened: In fact, jobs were created and living standards improved.
The key strategy when confronting some of these big changes was and still is to re-train and re-skill people in order to transform the workforce.
If we bring AI into hospitality, we can create content, work with predictive personalization, recognize emotions when a guest walks through the door, or even have a real-time conversation in any language, not to mention implement cost efficiencies and maximize revenue.
Over millennia, humanity has been shaped by successive waves of technology. People have lived through transformational moments that seemed small at the time but that ignited a brand-new world full of new possibilities — the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, electricity and today, artificial intelligence.
We are about to see the greatest digital re-evolution and I want to be part of it. The sky is the limit!
Mercedes Blanco is chief partnerships officer at The Hotels Network and a founding member of Women in Travel Thrive.
The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Hotel News Now or CoStar Group and its affiliated companies. Bloggers published on this site are given the freedom to express views that may be controversial, but our goal is to provoke thought and constructive discussion within our reader community. Please feel free to contact an editor with any questions or concern.