4 myths about chatbots & artificial intelligence

In the last two years, there has been an enormous amount of hype around chatbots & Artificial Intelligence. A lot of tech experts & industry veterans feel these technologies are going to completely disrupt the way business is conducted around the world. According to a PwC report, a good 72% of the business leaders believe that AI is a definite business advantage and will become vital to a company’s success in the near future.

With regards to chatbots, the future looks equally bright. It has been predicted that more than 80% of businesses will be implementing some sort of automation using chatbot technology by the year 2020.
Given all this development, there are a lot of questions being raised. Will machines finally be able to think like humans? Will artificial intelligence solve all our problems? Will it be easy to implement these technologies? Along with these questions, there are some really fabricated answers to them, circulating the web.

Let’s debunk some of these myths and separate fact from fiction.

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AI will wipe away lot of human jobs

A lot of the so-called tech gurus feel that artificial intelligence will enable companies to automate a lot of their business processes and thereby make humans redundant. The truth of the matter is that AI will lead us into the age of big thinking. According to a PwC report, AI will help automate work of tasks like paperwork (82%), timesheets (78%) & scheduling (79%).
This implies that humans will now be able to focus on more strategic & creative tasks in future. Also, a Gartner study predicts that Artificial Intelligence will help create around 2.3 million new jobs by 2020 and will eliminate only 1.8 million in the same time period.

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Machines will be able to learn like humans do

A few months ago, Google’s Deep Mind AI caught everyone’s attention when it began to run by trial and error on its own. People felt that with the help of techniques like deep learning, neural networks & others, machines will be able to learn exactly like humans.
However, this is not true. Machines still lack the ability to process data creatively & respond instinctively like humans. These traits are not going to be acquired by machines in the near future.

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All bots require Artificial Intelligence

Yes, it is true that artificial intelligence is the foundation of many popular intelligent chatbots but not all bots require AI. In fact, most of the bots today are rule-based and work on the basis of a decision tree.
There are many chatbot generator platforms out there using which one can make chatbots for businesses (enterprise chatbots) or for other purposes without having to do any AI implementation. Building chatbots that are purely AI driven is a complex affair and there is still work being done in that direction.

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Artificial Intelligence will make Natural Intelligence obsolete

There are concerns being raised that because of technologies like Natural Language Understanding (NLU, Machine Learning & Deep Learning, machines will become super-advanced and begin to solve all of our problems. Humans will become completely dependent on them for their day to day living & will stop using their own inborn talent.
If you look at what has happened so far, you will see that automation has made our life easier but at the same time presented us with complex challenges. Once these machines take over most of our repetitive work, humans will be required more than ever before to make use of their critical thinking & creativity. Natural Intelligence of humans will become even more valuable.
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Conclusion

Artificial Intelligence & chatbots are the new emerging technologies that promise to transform our lives. While there is great potential in them, we need to be realistic in our expectations & also not carry unfounded assumptions. The future is for machines & humans to work together.

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