There has been a lot of talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking over the world. Images of Robots taking over the world is always the way they explain it. To explain it simply, its not a take over of robots its a reliance on computer logic to make decisions that were previously made by people. That has been occurring for a long time. Telephones where manually switched and controlled by people and eventually taken over by simple wiring and that performed functions that people used to do manually.
The issue at had is how far do we go with automation of tasks that should normally be done by people. Telephone call centers have been replaced by automated voice recognition to take that initial call and divert it to the appropriate center. It’s annoying but it saves money and in most situations its not critical if it gets something wrong. If however they used voice recognition on an emergency 911/000 call that can be disastrous so they tend to be manned by people.
The decision on what to automate and what not must be based on the consequence of getting it wrong. At the top of the list is automation of military systems that can cause deaths. At the other extreme is a magic 8-ball that decision on what action you should take on an unimportant decision. Although the consequence criteria is the most important one to consider its normally profit that determines what is AI’ed and what is not.