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Many have suggested that AI-based algorithms represent the greatest current opportunity for human progress. But their unpredictability represents the greatest threat as well, and it has not been precisely clear what steps should be taken by us as end users. Kartik Hosanagar, John C. Hower Professor; Professor of Operations, Information, and Decisions, The Wharton School

Artificial Intelligence for Business is an online program for learners seeking the competitive edge in emerging business technology. Technology-oriented professionals, online marketers, statisticians, automation innovators and data professionals will benefit from this 4-week certificate.

In the artificial intelligence course, youll learn the fundamentals of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning, and how to deploy these technologies to support your organizations strategy. Professor Kartik Hosanagar of the Wharton School has designed this course to help you gain a better understanding of AI and Machine Learning, using real-life examples. Youll learn about the different types and methods of Machine Learning, and how businesses have applied Machine Learning successfully. Youll also cover the ethics and risks of AI in business management, and how to design governance frameworks for proper implementation. By the end of this course, youll have a foundational understanding of artificial intelligence in business and be able to incorporate these technologies into your business strategy.

The Artificial Intelligence for Business program is designed to provide learners with insights into the established and emerging developments in AI for business. This includes Big Data, Machine Learning in finance, and the operational changes AI will bring. The lessons within this course are applicable to multiple industries and dynamic markets. This course is taught by internationally-recognized internet marketing and media business professor, Kartik Hosanagar, PhD, and takes into account the latest data and insights in the AI realm.

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Business Course Wharton

The Internal Revenue Service unveiled a new artificial intelligence system it says will cut wait times to resolve simple tasks and improve customer service.

The technology enables the new phone system to authenticate callers by asking them basic questions, IRS officials said during a call with reporters Friday. The new system can understand complete and natural ways of speaking, they said.

For the first time in 160 years, this agency is able to successfully interact with a taxpayer using artificial intelligence to access their account and resolve it, in certain situations, without any wait on hold, IRS Deputy Commissioner Darren Guillot said during the call.

When taxpayers receive a mailed letter stating they owe money, they can use an ID number from the letter to call in and access the improved system, agency officials explained.

Frederick Schindler, the agency's director of collection, said his team staggered the generation and mailing of over 3 million letters so they will arrive in mailboxes in the coming days, enabling callers to make use of the new system.

In this photo illustration an IRS logo seen displayed on a smartphone.

SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images, FILE

The IRS efforts to improve its phone system come roughly three months after the statutory body said it would hire 10,000 additional employees to cut through a pandemic-related backlog.

Expanding the phone bot with artificial intelligence demonstrates an improvement over the previous phone system, the IRS officials said. The previous unauthenticated phone bot could only answer basic questions and allowed callers to set up one-time payments, they said.

That more basic technology, which does not allow the system to pull up a person's IRS account, is also the technology behind an online chatbox the agency uses.

Because of the authentication capability of the new bot, it can access a callers IRS account. From there, callers can discuss and set up a payment plan with the bot without spending time on hold a process that would typically take 17-20 minutes with a human operator, IRS officials said.

By allowing the phone bot to handle more simple issues, it frees up human operators for more complex matters, the IRS officials said.

Treasury Department Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo recently told ABC News that the IRS received over 200 million calls and only had 15,000 people to answer those calls last year.

Even with the intelligent phone bot, callers will still have the option to speak with a human for additional support, IRS officials said.

Many callers owe less than $25,000, and can name their price, or the monthly amount they will commit to paying. The artificial intelligence system then computes that amount to determine whether it falls within the agency's deadline for repayment.

The Internal Revenue Service building is seen in Washington, D.C, April 5, 2022.

Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images, FILE

The new bot will not guide callers to pay more than the price they name, the officials explained.

While officials on the call admitted the new phone bot will offer a return on investment through expanded compliance, he said increasing government revenue was not the primary focus of developing the system.

Service is part of our name, Guillot said. This is all about the taxpayer experience, helping customers, he said later.

But not all callers will enjoy the no-wait time the authenticated phone bot offers. It launched only on the automated collection system and accounts management phone lines Tuesday, the IRS officials said.

For now, it is operating at 25% of its intended capacity, which saw the bot answer over 13,000 calls Thursday. The IRS plans to bring more of the system online through the end of next week, IRS officials said.

We have phone lines to deal with specific issues like liens or settlement proposals, Schindler said. In the future, theres use cases for taking this technology, particularly as we learn more about it, to any one of our collection processes.

The bot currently operates in English and Spanish, with IRS officials hoping to expand its language offerings in the future, they said.

More immediate expansion plans include programming the authenticated bot to ask questions of callers who name their monthly payments to ensure it is within their financial means, the officials said.

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IRS rolls out artificial intelligence to help callers make payments ...

Due to hype and popular fiction, the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) are typically associated in the public eye with Sci-Fi horror scenarios. These often involve killer robots and hyper-intelligent computer systems which consider humanity a nuisance that needs to be gotten rid of for the good of the planet. While nightmares like this often play out as overblown and silly in comic books and on-screen, the risks of artificial intelligence cannot be dismissed so lightly and AI dangers do exist.

In this article, well be looking at some of the real risks of artificial intelligence, and why AI is dangerous when looked at in certain contexts or wrongly applied.

Artificial intelligence encompasses a range of technologies and systems ranging from Googles search algorithms, through smart home gadgets, to military-grade autonomous weapons. So issuing a blanket confirmation or denial to the question Is Artificial Intelligence Dangerous? isnt that simple the issue is much more nuanced than that.

Most artificial intelligence systems today qualify as weak or narrow AI technologies designed to perform specific tasks such as searching the internet, responding to environmental changes like temperature, or facial recognition. Generally speaking, narrow AI performs better than humans at those specific tasks.

For some AI developers, however, the Holy Grail is strong AI or artificial general intelligence (AGI), a level of technology at which machines would have a much greater degree of autonomy and versatility, enabling them to outperform humans in almost all cognitive tasks.

While the super intelligence of strong AI has the potential to help us eradicate war, disease, and poverty, there are significant dangers of artificial intelligence at this level. However, there are those who question whether strong AI will ever be achieved, and others who maintain that if and when it does arrive, it can only be beneficial.

Optimism aside, the increasing sophistication of technologies and algorithms may have the result that AI is dangerous if its goals and implementation run contrary to our own expectations or objectives. The risks of AI in this context may hold even at the level of narrow or weak AI. If, for example, a home or in-vehicle thermostat system is poorly configured or hacked, its operation could pose a serious hazard to human health through over-heating or freezing. The same would apply to smart city management systems or autonomous vehicle steering mechanisms.

Most researchers agree that a strong or AGI system would be unlikely to exhibit human emotions such as love or hate, and would therefore not pose AI dangers through benevolent or malevolent intentions. However, even the strongest AI must be programmed by humans initially, and its in this context that the danger lies. Specifically, artificial intelligence analysts highlight two scenarios where the underlying programming or human intent of a system design could cause problems:

This threat covers all existing and future autonomous weapons systems (military drones, robots, missile defenses, etc.), or technologies capable of intentionally or unintentionally causing massive harm or physical destruction due to misuse, hacking, or sabotage.

Besides the prospect of an AI arms race and the possibility of AI-enabled warfare in the case of autonomous weaponry, there are AI risks posed by the design and deployment of the technology itself. With high stakes activity an inherent part of military design, such systems would probably have fail-safes that make them extremely difficult to deactivate once started and their human owners could conceivably lose control of them, in escalating situations.

The classic illustration of this AI danger comes in the example of a self-driving car. If you ask such a vehicle to take you to the airport as quickly as possible, it could quite literally do so breaking every traffic law in the book, causing accidents, and freaking you out completely, in the process.

At the super intelligence level of AGI, imagine a geo-engineering or climate control system thats given free rein to implement its programming in the most efficient manner possible. The damage it could cause to infrastructure and ecosystems could be catastrophic.

How dangerous is AI? At its current rate of development, artificial intelligence has already exceeded the expectations of many observers, with milestones having been achieved that were considered decades away, just a few years ago.

While some experts still estimate that the development of human-level AI is still centuries away, most researchers are coming round to the opinion that it could happen before 2060. And the prevailing view amongst all observers is that, as long as were not 100% sure that artificial general intelligence wont happen this century, its a good idea to start safety research now, to prepare for its arrival.

Many of the safety problems associated with super intelligent AI are so complex that they may require decades to solve. A super intelligent AI will, by definition, be very good at achieving its goals whatever they may be. As humans, well need to ensure that its goals are completely aligned with ours. The same holds for weaker artificial intelligence systems as the technology continues to evolve.

Intelligence enables control, and as technology becomes smarter, the greatest danger of artificial intelligence lies in its capacity to exceed human intelligence. Once that milestone is achieved, we run the danger of losing our control over the technology. And this danger becomes even more severe if the goals of that technology dont align with our own objectives.

A scenario whereby an AGI whose goals run counter to our own uses the internet to enforce the implementation of its internal directives illustrates why AI is dangerous in this respect. Such a system could potentially impact the financial markets, manipulate social and political discourse, or introduce technological innovations that we can barely imagine, much less keep up with.

The keys to determining why artificial intelligence is dangerous or not lie in its underlying programming, the method of its deployment, and whether or not its goals are in alignment with our own.

As technology continues its march toward artificial general intelligence, AI has the potential to become more intelligent than any human, and we currently have no way of predicting how it will behave. What we can do is everything in our power to ensure that the goals of that intelligence remain compatible with ours and the research and design to implement systems that keep them that way.

Summary:

Artificial intelligence encompasses a range of technologies and systems ranging from Googles search algorithms, through smart home gadgets, to military-grade autonomous weapons. So issuing a blanket confirmation or denial to the question Is Artificial Intelligence Dangerous? isnt that simple. For some AI developers, the Holy Grail is strong AI or artificial general intelligence (AGI), a level of technology at which machines would have a much greater degree of autonomy and versatility, enabling them to outperform humans in almost all cognitive tasks. While the super intelligence of strong AI has the potential to help us eradicate war, disease, and poverty, there are significant dangers of artificial intelligence at this level. The keys to determining why artificial intelligence is dangerous or not lie in its underlying programming, the method of its deployment, and whether or not its goals are in alignment with our own.

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Dangers & Risks of Artificial Intelligence - ITChronicles

With the IU and LSBU (London South Bank University) dual degree track, you get a unique opportunity you can choose if you want to graduate with both a German and a British graduation certificate, without any extra academic requirements. The study programmes at IU and at LSBU are coordinated and therefore equivalent to each other.

Start your studies at IU, and if you want to apply for your British certificate* all you have to do is send in your application and pay the required fee. Youll then be awarded a degree from LSBU following your graduation if all of your study requirements have been fulfilled successfully.

Graduate with a German Bachelors, MBA or Masters degree along with a UK Bachelors with Honours (Hons), MBA or Masters.

London South Bank University is well-known for its impressive internationality, as testified by over 18,000 students from more than 130 countries. Similar to IU, LSBU has also been awarded multiple awards and praised for its focus on improving graduates career opportunities.

Our cooperation was born out of one goal: to help you get the best jobs in the world with a dual degree.

Get in touch with our Student Advisory Team, send in your application form and receive your British graduation certificate after youve successfully graduated from IU.

*only available for selected study programmes: B.Sc. Data Science, B.Sc. Computer Science, B.A.A. Business Administration, B.A. International Management, M.Sc. Artificial Intelligence, M.Sc. Computer Science, M.Sc. Data Science, M.A. Master Management with electives (Engineering, Finance & Accounting, Int. Marketing, IT, Leadership, Big Data), MBA with electives (Big Data, Engineering, Finance & Accounting, IT, Marketing).

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Master in Artificial Intelligence Online | IU International

The Artificial Intelligencemaster's degree program is designed as a 30-credit hour curriculum that give students a comprehensive framework for artificial intelligence with one of 4 concentration areas: (1) Computer Vision, (2) Intelligent Interaction, (3) Machine Learning, and (4) Knowledge Management and Reasoning.

Students will engage in an extensive core intended curriculum to develop depth in all the core concepts that build a foundation for artificial intelligence theory and practice. Also, they will be given the opportunity to build on the core knowledge of AI by taking a variety of elective courses selected from colleges throughout campus to explore key contextual areas or more complex technical AI applications.

The program will be accessible to both full-time and part-time students, aiming to train students who aspire to have AI research and development (R&D) or leadership careers in industry. To accommodate the needs of working professionals who might be interested in this degree program, the course offerings for the MS in AI will be in the late afternoon and evening hours to allow students to earn the degree through part-time study. The program may be completed entirely on campus, entirely online, or through a combination of on-campus and online courses.

If you have additional questions, please contact the program director: Dr. Jin Lu (jinluz@umich.edu).

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MS in Artificial Intelligence | University of Michigan-Dearborn