Artificial intelligence may be revolutionary, but it has its limitations: What AI cannot do is evident above all in what defines humans and living beings in general.
What AI cannot do: Fundamental limits of artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence, or AI for short, is on everyone's lips and is often praised as a panacea for a wide variety of challenges. But despite the remarkable progress, there are areas in which AI is – at least for now – inferior to human intelligence and capabilities.
- The creativity of AI is limited because, although it can recognize patterns and build on them, it is only capable of performing genuinely creative acts that create something new to a limited extent. However, this is changing in the context of generative AI, in the development of which artificial intelligence is certainly capable of creating new content, for example in art and music.
- Emotional understanding and empathy are human capabilities that AI cannot replicate because it lacks awareness of emotions.
- AI systems require large amounts of data to learn and are unable to deliver reliable results without this data. Depending on the topicality of a topic, AI may also provide information that does not correspond to the latest human knowledge.
- The ability to think and act outside of given parameters is a property that AI systems do not have. It is difficult for them to react to new and unexpected situations because they rely on predefined scenarios.
Practical hurdles for artificial intelligence
In addition to the fundamental limitations, there are also practical hurdles that AI cannot currently overcome. These relate, among other things, to integrating AI into existing systems and processes and applying it there.
- Integrating AI into existing systems that were not designed to use AI is a particular challenge.
- AI systems depend on the programmed algorithms, which means they cannot react flexibly to unpredictable events.
- In industry and production, AI can challenge or make human workers redundant. This naturally has consequences on both the economic and social levels that not everyone welcomes.
- Without humans, AI cannot yet develop further. But even though AI can already take on many tasks, there are shortcomings when it comes to communication. This is where AI reaches its limits, because it can process natural language, for example, but has difficulty grasping the subtleties of human dialogue such as irony or sarcasm.
- AI systems can learn, but they lack an understanding of the meaning and consequences of their actions. In addition, AI lacks the ability to build trust and maintain human relationships because it cannot form emotional bonds.
- Data protection and ethical concerns are also slowing down the development and application of AI in sensitive areas such as medicine or human resources.
Ethical aspects surrounding AI
The ethical implications of AI use also require intensive discussion and consideration. AI cannot make ethical decisions on its own, which makes it problematic to use it in certain areas.
- Who is responsible for the decisions made by AI systems is often unclear and raises legal and ethical questions.
- AI systems can reflect biases and discrimination present in training data, thereby amplifying existing problems and conflicts.
- Making decisions about AI in critical situations, such as autonomous driving or medicine, requires ethical guidelines that have yet to be developed. AI decisions are also not always particularly transparent, as the algorithms often act as “black boxes” whose functionality cannot be understood by outsiders.