Can Artificial Intelligence Safeguard Us?

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the whole world scenarios. With tremendous rise in this field, it’s everyone’s concern that can artificial intelligence replace human intelligence? If so, how good substitute it can be in the areas like security requiring high level of intelligence. When we consider this topic for a debate, some accept it, some oppose it. For a better clarification, four top AI experts on April 3, 2019 debated on one of the sci-fi platforms at Doha. They discussed the real scenarios in which Artificial Intelligence can help or harm humanity’s overall well-being. Likewise so many debates are conducted to discuss the possible effects of AI development, and almost all of them conclude listing the pros of artificial intelligence.

To verify that conclusions of each debate are absolutely correct, we need to crosscheck the effects of artificial intelligence in every field. For that, let us examine some of the recent applications of AI that enable security such as airport security check, banking sector, surveillance, cyber-security, etc.

Safe passage through AI

Statistic shows that 20 of the most active airports around the world has moved around 700 million passengers in the previous year. Monitoring and analyzing of such a bulk amount of peoples can be cumbersome task. The tiresome level of the job can eventually help anyone to carry out any fraudulent activities easily. So definitely we need better systems at airports. Rise of artificial intelligence has helped authorities to make a better control and monitoring over passengers at the airport.

Some of the AI techniques adopted in airport systems are:

• Scrutiny of passports and boarding pass by smart robots at the check-in and check-out counters.
• Introduction of facial recognition system as a security-related task.

Introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the banking industry. The technique has provided more benefits to the financial sector with its enormous speed and efficiency. Net banking and UPI transactions are some of the examples that had made an effortless service possible to its customers.

Prior to the introduction of these technologies, the sector also remained a home ground for many fraudulent activities. Money laundering is a good example of such practices. It is the circulation of large sums of money generated through an illegal activity. The process help to “clean” the money making the whole process unfair. AI techniques like Anti Money Laundering (AML) systems designed to catch these cheating red handed. The technique work on previous data provided and formulate particular patterns which can resemble these activities and adopt the accurate counter measures for it.

Advancement in Cyber Security

Usage of ransomware and other hacking techniques had made cyber-security a stack of opportunities for everyone regardless of their ethics. Citing to an incident of a hospital shut down due to a simple cyber attack can prove how deadly this can disrupt the lives of a common man. Such malicious attacks are hard to beat, both in its complexity and pace. Thanks to the artificial intelligence, which has enabled a better digital space puzzling the hackers out there. The technique has enabled a faster and better response to these threats. Moreover, it also removes unwanted signals and noises enabling an early detection of malware attacks.

For a long time, password protections were the best security practices in the cyber world, but not any more. Nowadays password protections are more vulnerable to cyber attacks. Artificial intelligence has revolutionized these acts by the introduction of various bio metrics logins and data driven security models. Fingerprint, retina and voice encryption has made the security even more hard to breach. In order to trespass it one might arrange an exact replica of credentials required like fingerprints or eyes!!

Surveillance

Surveillance is a direct field of security applications. These digital eyes are responsible for continuous monitoring of any place at any time. But a major drawback of this technique is the requirement of a constantly monitoring human. Incorporating artificial technique to this ideology can help us auto detect and monitor through surveillance cameras. Even though this possess a novel threat to our privacy, techniques like redaction and other further advancements in the field can be made use of for censoring such sensitive part in the data.

Limitations of Artificial Intelligence

The pros of adopting artificial intelligence can be argued endlessly. However some of the major difficulties that one can face while adopting the technique are data collection, data labeling, requirement of large memory storage, hardware and software limitations, etc. All these are either tedious job or difficult to achieve while enabling a smart solution. Among them data labeling or tagging is the most tiresome job. Either this procedure can be carried out by oneself or can seek the help from experts. The latter is preferred more so as to process quality training data for AI models despite of the bulk of data to be handled.

Summing up the entire session, we can conclude that artificial intelligence has eventually enabled better privacy and security for our data and life. Looking forward for further developments in the field is the best thing we can do as we need AI for a secure life.

Originally published at https://www.infolks.info on May 24, 2019.