As the application and influence of artificial intelligence grows, the technology is poised to save time and unlock potential, according to the consensus of a panel discussion in Greenville on Nov. 17.
The Advantage Greenville meeting sponsored by Furman University’s Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship convened a group of innovators, educators and industry experts to discuss the growing role of AI. Scores of attendees packed the theater at the Greenville ONE Center to hear an assessment of AI’s emerging role in the local, national and global economies.
While panelists acknowledged there are widespread concerns the technology could produce dire outcomes, the consensus was AI has a huge upside potential to free people from a host of time-consuming tasks and allow them to use that time more creatively and productively.
The panelists were as follows:
- Lelia King, executive director of Build Carolina, home to Carolina Code School.
- Patrick Musau, a Furman Ph.D. alumnus and software engineer with Google AI Accelerator.
- Spencer Tate and Nemath Ahmed, Furman seniors and co-founders of dotflo Inc., a startup which uses an AI agent to assist businesses in research and prospecting.
- Garrett Stern, executive director of Furman’s Center for Innovative Leadership, served as moderator.
AI has developed so fast and proven so useful that there is hardly an industry that isn’t using it in some fashion, Musau said.
“I personally think it’s a great time to be optimistic about what can be done with AI,” he said.
He added the pace at which the technology is developing makes it hard to foresee all the ways it will impact people’s lives.
“There’s going to be something that no one sees right now,” he said.
King pointed out South Carolina colleges and universities awarded about 800 bachelor’s degrees related to some type of computer technology statewide in 2021. In contrast, there were more than 540 programming-related job openings just in Greenville County a day before the panel discussion.
“The point is, there’s a gap,” she said.
Tate and Ahmed said AI promises to give people back the time they would spend on tedious tasks but it would likely never replace the critical thinking and creativity of humans.
Terms to know:
- Artificial intelligence — A program that can sense, reason, act and adapt.
- Machine learning — Algorithms whose performance improves as they are exposed to more data over time.
- Deep learning — A subset of machine learning in which multilayered neural networks learn from vast amounts of data.
Source: builtin.com
