Positive ways we’re using AIs

10 Ways AI is Transforming Our World

 We’re already using AIs in amazing ways and are only at the beginning of what’s possible. Just like the wheel, electricity, and the internet, AI will eventually be woven so deeply into everyday life that we won’t realize we’re using it, and many of us will struggle to live a normal life without it. For example, AIs will operate behind the scenes, helping us create shopping lists, meal plans, workout schedules, and dating profiles, planning routes, birthday parties, and vacations, managing schedules and budgets, writing resumes, emails, job applications, sales adverts, and essays, and powering healthcare, education, smart travel, fraud detection, policing, and even improving sports. However, as with other significant inventions such as steam power, electricity, and the internet, we’ll face disruption and challenges that force us to re-ask the ageold question of whether the benefits of progress outweigh the negative impacts on individuals and society. As a quick example, as well as advancing society and creating new jobs, AIs will cause some job losses and many of us will have to adapt and reskill. Let’s look at a few of the ways AIs are improving the World's.

AIs at Home 

Myfirst memory of AI in our family home occurred a few years ago while I was helping my 12-year-old daughter with a school project about the solar system. I was shocked when she casually asked an AI chatbot on her phone how far away the moon was. That shock quickly changed into concern as I did a typical dad thing accusing her of cheating and being lazy. However, as we discussed it, I realized that asking an AI was essentially the same as asking Google, asking her schoolteacher, or even going to the library and looking up the answer in a book–all of these methods give her the answer without requiring her to use a telescope or perform any mathematical equations. I also realized that having instant access to AI on a phone is like carrying an entire library and a personal library assistant in your pocket. Since then, AI has become a part of our everyday family life, and we’re increasingly dependent on it. As a quick example, the same daughter plays football (soccer), and I know the routes to most of the venues where she plays. However, we were almost late for a recent game when we got stuck in traffic that was leaving a local music festival. As we sat in the painfully slow traffic, I vowed to use the car’s GPS navigation system for all future journeys, even the ones I do regularly. I’ve been good to my word and almost always accept the optimized routes the car’s AIpowered GPS gives me. As a family, we also have Alexa devices that use natural language processing AI. We have video doorbells and external home cameras that use computer vision AI to detect humans and ignore things like cats and squirrels. Mywife loves her car’s self-driving AI, especially on highways and motorways, where she feels more alert when the car is driving itself (go figure). Also, my mother-in-law, who is in her 70s, has used ChatGPT to help her plan meals with requirements such as no pasta and mainly vegetables. On the topic of food, ChefGPT20 is a personal AI chef that prevents food waste and saves you money by creating recipes and meal plans based on the food you already have in your kitchen. You tell it what ingredients and kitchen tools you have, and the app gives you recipes and cooking instructions. It will even base the recipes on your cooking abilities. Many other home-focused AIs exist, including smart vacuum cleaners that roam around homes keeping floors clean, smart coffee machines that learn your schedule and brew your morning coffee so it’s ready when you walk into the kitchen, smart thermostats that keep your home comfortable and help you save energy, and smart locks that unlock as you arrive home and even tell you when your children have come home or gone out. Mobile phone makers are also cramming their phones with AI features that can search your photos, summarize YouTube videos, and much more. A great example is Google’s best take21, which takes multiple photos over a couple of seconds and uses facial recognition AI to scan the photos, finds an instance of each person where they’re looking at the camera and smiling, and groups them into a best take photo. It’s perfect for those group photos where it can feel impossible to get everyone looking at the camera and smiling with their eyes open at the same time. The take-home point is that you can use AI to help you with almost everything, and it’s getting easier every day. For example, you can ask AI to help you choose the best vegetables to plant in your garden, how to care for them, and when to harvest them. You can use it to help you plan birthday parties and gift ideas, help you write a poem for a friend, suggest warm places to visit in winter, list ideas for romantic dates, help you with recipes for themed baking, summarize large documents you’re struggling to understand, write a job application, write an advert to sell your car, design a wedding invitation, and much more. Despite the many positive impacts AIs are having on our home lives, many of us are concerned about our privacy and worry that AI-powered devices such as Alexa are spying on us. While these are legitimate concerns, most of us have used mobile phones for many years that are far more capable of listening to our private conversations and profiling our private lives. So, any of us concerned that Alexa might be listening should probably be more concerned about our mobile phones that we’ve been taking in the car, on vacation, out to dinner, and even to the bathroom. 

AIs in education

 Mywife and I attended a recent AI in Education summit22 at Epsom College in the UK and were simultaneously excited and disappointed by the potential for AI in education. Wewere excited about the opportunities to provide personalized learning and one-to-one interactions for children with special educational needs. But we were disappointed with how far behind the curve many education-focused AIs are. This is because the vast majority of AI innovation is following the money into sectors where they can make the biggest profits. Unfortunately, education is poorly funded in most countries and isn’t overflowing with opportunities for AI companies to make big money. Despite this, schools and teachers are doing exciting things with AIs. One of my favorite examples is Sparx Maths, which uses AI to create personalized homework for my teenage and pre-teen children. It sets them tasks, learns from their responses, and adjusts the difficulty of future questions to ensure they’re challenging but achievable. Our children’s schools have used Sparx Maths for several years, and we’ve been delighted as parents. My wife and children also use AI apps like Duolingo to improve their language studies. Many schools and teachers are using AIs to create and share lesson plans, create quizzes, personalize learning, generate timetables, help check homework, organize children into appropriate groups and classes, streamline communication with parents, and many more things that enable teachers and staff to spend more time focusing on children and families. However, some schools have gone further and are already implementing teacherless classrooms where AIs do the teaching. David Game College was the first school in the UK to do this, charging students £27,000 per year for a “precise and bespoke AI-based learning experience” that the school’s coprincipal, John Dalton, doesn’t think human teachers can match. Interestingly, this AI classroom of 20 students is supported by three human learning coaches and could be a glimpse into the future of classrooms where AI’s provide highly personalized learning with support from human assistants. As part of her Master’s in Early Childhood Education, mywife is researching using AI robots to help children with special educational needs. As part of her research, she has a cute little Moxie AI robot23 that is a blend of AIs, including facial and body language perception, speech recognition, and language models. These allow it to have engaging conversations, maintain eye contact, and infer how a child may be feeling. It also remembers previous conversations and has basic cognitive behavioral therapy training. Her research aims to determine whether AI robots like Moxie can be an additional tool to assist schools and teachers in providing one-on-one support helping young children develop social and emotional skills and reduce anxiety. Such robots can be supremely patient, will never lose their temper, and will always communicate on the same level as the child. Away from schools and classrooms, our experience with Moxie has opened our eyes to the huge potential of AIbased children’s toys and teddy bears. Not only will these provide children with a more enriching technology experience than just staring at screens, but they will also provide emotional support and help children develop their language and social skills at home. We’re also at an interesting point in the use of AIs for professional and academic writing. While none of us want students to cheat, we should remember that spell-checkers, grammar-checkers, and even calculators were once considered cheating but are now universally accepted. As such, we should expect AIs to become an integral part of professional and academic writing, especially when word processors and other writing tools are integrating AIs and making it increasingly difficult to write without them. This, in turn, reinforces the need for children to be exposed to AIs from an early age and throughout their educational journeys so they’re prepared to thrive in a world with AI. While the potential of AI in education is enormous, it’s important to address concerns over privacy, bias, and whether skills learned from AI robots transfer well to human interactions. But these are old questions that apply equally to human teachers. For example, human teachers are not allowed to photograph children on their personal devices, they are prone to bias, and children respond differently depending on the age, sex, and teaching style of their teachers.

AIs in healthcare and medical research

 We’re seeing some of the most exciting AI-related advancements in the areas of healthcare and medical research. Agreat example is a company called Dotlumen24 that creates AI technology to help visually impaired people who don’t have access to a guide dog. According to Dotlumen, there are approximately 300 million visually impaired people in the world, but only around twenty-eight thousand guide dogs. That’s more than ten thousand visually impaired people per guide dog. Dotlumen is trying to fill this gap by developing wearable devices that use computer vision AI to pull the wearer in the right direction like a guide dog. 

You wear the device on your head, and it uses cameras and sensors to map your surroundings and provide haptic feedback against your forehead to “pull” you in the right direction. According to Dotlumen, the device computes your walking path 100 times per second and responds faster than human sight. They say it’s focused on safety, can do everything a guide dog can do, and may even be able to help you with your shopping and reading. People who tested it at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES)25 found it to be intuitive and reliable at helping them walk around the busy show floor while blindfolded. Another example is smart stethoscopes26 that use AI to help doctors and clinicians spot early signs of heart failure. These technologies, and many more like them, have the potential to positively impact millions of lives. And we’re only getting started! Pharmaceutical companies are already using AIs27 to help design and execute clinical trials for experimental new drugs. They’re using AIs to recruit patients, manage the trial process, analyze the data, and even predict how successful the trials will be. We’re also using AIs to analyze X-rays and brain scans28, and annotate medical images29 to assist with research and help us identify and treat diseases such as cancer.

On the topic of cancer, AIs can already analyze skin lesions and identify malignant skin cancers30 with the “same degree of accuracy as board-certified dermatologists”, and AIs like IBM Watson can personalize cancer treatments31 based on individual patient’s genes. In my own family, we use a phone app that uses computer vision AI to analyze photos of moles and warn us if they resemble confirmed cases of skin cancer.

AIs in society 

I travel quite a lot with work and regularly land in a new city with only a hotel address and a confirmation number. I’ll follow airport signs to transport services and then use the AI services on my phone for almost everything else. For example, I’ll take a taxi or use an app to order a ride. While on the ride, I’ll use my phone’s AI-based map application to ensure it’s taking me to the right place. Once I’ve checked in at the hotel, I’ll speak to my phone, asking it to show me places to eat, such as “Show me the best places to eat seafood that are less than a 20minute walk” or “Where are some restaurants that serve authentic local food.” I’ll also ask it for the best tourist places to visit and how to get to the conference venue I’m speaking at. I also use my phone as my car key and for all my purchases (Apple Pay, Alipay, Google Pay, etc.), and my wife does the same. On a few occasions, she’s left her phone in her car and had to use another person’s phone to call me and ask me to unlock her car remotely. On one of these occasions I was in the US and had to remotely unlock her car that was in the UK. I’m aware that relying on technology and AI services like this could put me in a vulnerable position if I lose my phone or it runs out of power. But it hasn’t happened yet. Dating apps are an increasingly popular way to find life partners. Some of these apps use AIs to match potential partners, some use AI chatbots to help couples chat more easily, and people looking for partners use AIs to help them create appealing dating profiles. Is using AIs like this a modern equivalent of asking a friend or family member if you look good before going out on a date or asking them how to respond to a message from a potential romantic interest? As always, there are instances of people using AIs to create fake dating profiles, and we should always practice vigilance when interacting with people online. Police forces and other security services regularly use facial recognition AIs to “prevent and detect crime, find wanted criminals, safeguard vulnerable people, and protect people from harm.”32 We tend to love these AIs when they help catch criminals but are less happy about them watching us, or when we believe governments and law enforcement agencies are misusing them. Companies and creative individuals are using AIs to create music, film, art, writing, fashion designs, computer games, and more. Sometimes, this is as simple as asking an AI for ideas, but many AIs are already creating new pieces of music, videos, entire books, and more. And while we might oppose the idea of AIs doing things that have historically been the forte of humans, we’ve already passed the point where we can tell the difference. So, before you vow never to listen to AI-created music, you should check that the last song or composition you listened to was created entirely by humans.

AIs in transport 

The headline grabbers in this space are definitely the self-driving cars, but they aren’t the only ways AI is influencing modern transport. Most of us know about Tesla’s efforts to build autonomous self-driving cars. How successful they’ve been is up for debate, but there’s no doubt they’ve made outstanding progress and pushed the boundaries of computer vision AI and 3D modeling–Tesla vehicles read road signs, identify vehicles, humans, and other obstacles, and incorporate advanced physics, object tracking, and complex spatial awareness. So, even if you’re not ready to let one drive you around, there’s no doubt they’ve made huge advances. Many of these advances are impacting the taxi cab industry, with companies like Waymo, WeRide, and Cruise operating driverless taxi cabs, known as robotaxis, in several cities around the world. Waymo, formerly the Google Self-Driving Car Project, already offers robotaxis in San Francisco, LA, and Phoenix and is expanding into more cities. You use the Waymo app to book a ride, the car arrives, you get in, and the car’s AI drives you to your destination. During your ride, you’ll see the steering wheel and foot pedals moving even though there’s no physical driver. Behind the scenes, Waymo rides are packed with cameras and sensors that feed an AI capable of safe city driving. They use LiDAR technology, which works well in light and dark conditions, to send laser pulses in every direction. They use radars that are effective in rain, fog, and snow. And they have cameras that can also see in the dark. These all feed into the car’s AI, which uses them to build a high-fidelity 3D model of its surroundings that is far more detailed and up-to-date than what a human can see. And it sees everything in all directions at all times. Waymo self-driving AIs are capable of reading road signs, interpreting traffic lights, and even responding to traffic cops directing traffic with hand and arm signals33. It never gets drunk, tired, or distracted; it won’t get sick, won’t take risks if it’s late, won’t show off to friends, won’t try to beat the lights, and won’t drive angrily or respond to road rage incidents. Tesla also has plans for robotaxis, Cruise has plans for its robotaxis to be available via the Uber app34, and WeRide is “testing and operating autonomous driving in 30 cities in seven countries”35. Future robotaxis may become more spacious by removing the steering wheel and foot pedals that are no longer needed. We may even use driving AIs to teach humans how to drive and simulate the conditions of a driving test. Not everybody is happy though, and drivers’ unions are hitting back at the prospect of human cab drivers losing their jobs36.

 On the flip side, people who feel unsafe getting into a cab with an unknown driver, especially at night, may feel safer with a robotaxi. I’ve also been in taxis where I’ve felt unsafe due to a crazy driver going too fast and making risky overtake maneuvers. On one family vacation, one of my daughters was close to tears after a traumatic taxi ride to the hotel. Away from the headline grabbers, many modern vehicles have simpler AIs that provide self-parking, lane detection with haptic feedback (vibrations and resistance on the steering wheel when you change lanes without signaling), adaptive cruise control, and can monitor drivers37 for signs of fatigue and distraction. Many countries also have smart highways that improve safety and traffic flow. These can adapt speed limits to suit traffic volume, close lanes when incidents occur, warn drivers and vehicles of obstructions, and close lanes to give emergency services vehicles prioritized access. Some local roads implement traffic signal AIs that optimize traffic light timings and patterns based on live data.

 As previously mentioned, not everyone is excited about self-driving AIs and AIs that monitor them for signs of fatigue or distraction while driving. But one area we can all get excited about is vehicle-based AIs automatically reporting potholes38 and other road defects so that road maintainers can fix them more quickly.

 AIs in science and tech 

The science and technology sectors are hotbeds of AI research, so I’ll keep this section short with just a single example. Google’s DeepMind labs made the headlines when their AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2 AIs achieved silver medal status at the 65th International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) in 2024. Many consider the IMO the most prestigious mathematical competition in the world, and the Google AIs were only one point short of gold medal status, outperforming most human contestants. However, they needed the problems translated into a special language and required extra time to solve some problems. Despite this, IMO President Gregor Dolinar called the results “stunning and breathtaking.”

We should expect future AIs to solve the problems faster and without needing them translated into a special language. However, the real breakthrough will be when AIs can solve mathematical problems humans cannot solve. 

AIs in the workplace 

AI is accelerating changes in the job market, and while it’s true that AI will create job losses, it will also create new jobs and positively change many existing jobs. For example, McKinsey’s Generative AI and the future of work in America report expects AI to enhance STEM, business, legal, and creative roles, while the World Economic Forum expects AI to create millions of new jobs.40 Predictions like these follow the trends and patterns of previous industrial revolutions that caused upheaval but ultimately led to better jobs in better working environments. Some hope that AI could bring us closer to a future where humans spend less time working and more time with family, nature, sport, art, and the many other beautiful things of life. As always, one of the best ways to survive and thrive during disruptive times is to embrace the reality of change and be excited about reskilling. Instead of trying to hide from AIs or outrun them, we should ride the waves they create.

Moving away from office-based work and into the food sector, a BBC article titled Are AI-created recipes hard to swallow? showcased some great examples of humans using AIs to create innovative meals for restaurants and fast food delivery. The article cited a pizza restaurant in Dubai and a taco restaurant in Texas. The pizza restaurant owner asked ChatGPT to create a recipe for the best pizza in Dubai, accounting for the huge immigrant population of Indians, Pakistanis, Filipinos, and Europeans. One of the suggestions was a pizza topped with “Arab shawarma chicken, Indian grilled paneer cheese, Middle Eastern Za’atar herbs, and tahini sauce.” It was a huge hit and was still on the menu when the article was published. The owner of the taco restaurant in Texas wanted ideas for a taco of the week, so she asked an AI for a recipe that used “eight ingredients, and… could only select one tortilla and one protein”. Some of the suggestions weren’t great, but her human judgment and taste led her to choose one of the AI recipes that went on to sell 22,000 tacos in a week. Some restaurants and food apps are using AIs to help customers create custom burgers and pizzas. In summary, change is ever-present in the workplace, and AI is accelerating such changes. Some of the changes will be negative, but many will be positive, and creative, adaptive humans should continue to thrive and may even have a better quality of life.

AIs in sports 

Most of the top professional tennis tournaments have replaced human line judges with the fully automated Hawk-Eye41 system that uses multiple cameras and a computer vision AI to make real-time line calls. It uses human-sounding voices to call shots “out,” and uses different voices for each line to give the feeling that humans are still making the calls. Hawk-Eye line calls are far more accurate, players have no line judges to argue with, and games proceed far more smoothly. For example, players are not allowed to challenge line calls in tournaments that use the fully automated Hawk-Eye system–if Hawk-Eye has called the ball out, a Hawk-Eye replay will not show the ball as “in”. Wimbledon and the French Open have been slow to adopt the fully automated Hawk-Eye system, but tennis legend John McEnroe called on them to scrap human line judges42 and said that if they’d used fully automated Hawk-Eye when he was a player “I would have been more boring, but would have won more.” Many professional football (soccer) leagues and tournaments use computer vision AIs to power semi-automated offside calls. These give match officials and TV viewers a quick 3D model showing the position of players at the time of the offense. It’s much quicker and more preferred than non-AI systems that require humans to pause a video replay and draw lines on a TV screen.

Some researchers are even training AIs to play sports. One example is an AI robot trained by Google DeepMind labs to play table tennis43 against human opponents. The first version of the AI beat all beginner-level humans, won slightly more than half of its games against humans competing at amateur levels, but lost all games against professionals. Considering it’s the first robot of its kind, we should expect future versions to be a lot better. These examples raise a lot of interesting questions, such as whether accurate line calling in tennis and football makes the games better for viewers. For example, would John McEnroe have been as entertaining if he didn’t have human line judges to argue with? Will sports be as enjoyable without the human element in refereeing? Will AIs ever compete against humans in professional sports? Will we ever see an AI-only Olympics? Would humans be interested in an AI-only Olympics? 

Chapter summary

 Things that we previously considered science fiction are already among us and improving home life, work life, education, healthcare, medical research, transport, and even sports. And there’s almost no limit on how we can use AI to improve our personal lives and the world around us. However, we may be on the precipice of a fourth industrial revolution: steam power > electricity > the internet > artificial intelligence. If this is true, we'll need to change and adapt to stay relevant, remain in gainful employment, and maximize what we get from life. We should also prepare for change and social unrest that often accompanies change.