Artificial intelligence now diagnoses illness, drives cars, translates languages and writes text. It brings huge benefits, and it raises hard questions about jobs, fairness, privacy and energy use. Learn what AI is, where it is used, and how to weigh its social, economic and environmental impact.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability of a computer system to carry out tasks that would normally need human intelligence, such as learning from data, reasoning, recognising images and speech, and understanding language. AI is used in medicine, transport, finance, customer service and many other areas. Its impact must be judged in three ways: social (effects on people and society), economic (effects on jobs, businesses and wealth) and environmental (effects on energy, resources and the planet). Most impacts have both benefits and drawbacks.
Fig. 1: three ways to judge the impact of an AI application
Section 01
What counts as AI?
An ordinary program follows rules a programmer wrote for every case. Many AI systems instead learn patterns from large amounts of example data, and can then deal with cases they have never seen before.
Application
What the AI does
Medical diagnosis
Analyses scans or test results to spot signs of disease, such as tumours, often as fast as a specialist.
Autonomous vehicles
Uses sensor and camera data to recognise roads, signs, vehicles and people and make driving decisions.
Natural language processing
Voice assistants, chatbots, translation and text generation that understand and produce human language.
Image and face recognition
Unlocks phones, tags photos, and is used in security and surveillance cameras.
Fraud detection
Learns a customer's normal spending pattern and flags unusual transactions.
Recommendation systems
Suggests products, videos or music based on what similar users chose.
Robotics and expert systems
Robots that adapt to their surroundings; expert systems that give advice in a narrow field, such as fault finding.
Examiner trap
Not every computer system is AI. A program that only follows fixed IF statements written by a programmer is not learning. Describe AI as doing tasks that normally need human intelligence, often by learning from data.
Section 02
Impact on people and jobs.
Social and economic impacts are linked, but examiners reward answers that keep them clearly separate and give a specific example of each.
Positive
Negative
Social
Earlier diagnosis and better healthcare; safer transport if self-driving cars cause fewer accidents; tools such as speech-to-text and image description help disabled people; repetitive or dangerous work is done by machines.
Bias: AI trained on unfair data can make unfair decisions about loans, jobs or policing; loss of privacy from data collection and face recognition; deepfakes and false information; unclear responsibility when an AI makes a harmful decision; people may come to rely on it too much.
Economic
Higher productivity and lower costs for businesses; new products and services; new jobs in AI development, data science and maintenance; work can be done 24 hours a day.
Jobs that are routine, such as data entry or call centre work, may be lost; workers need retraining; the wealth may go mostly to the few companies that own the AI; developing and training AI is very expensive.
Worked example A hiring tool
A company uses an AI system to sort job applications. It was trained on the applications of people the company hired over the last ten years. Explain one social impact.
The AI learns patterns from past hiring decisions.
If those decisions favoured one group, for example men, the AI learns the same preference.
Equally good applicants from other groups are then rejected more often, without a person noticing.
Answer: The system can repeat and hide bias, leading to unfair discrimination.
Your turn
Give one economic benefit and one economic drawback of a supermarket replacing checkout staff with AI-powered cameras that charge customers automatically.
Benefit: lower wage costs and faster service, so higher profits or lower prices. Drawback: checkout jobs are lost, and the system is expensive to develop, install and maintain.
Stage 1 · Learn
Check what the sim just showed you
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What is artificial intelligence?
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How do many modern AI systems learn to recognise objects in images?
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Which is a social impact of AI?
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Which is an environmental impact of AI?
Section 03
Impact on the planet.
AI runs in large data centres. Its environmental impact is easy to forget because users never see the hardware.
Energy: training a large AI model runs thousands of processors for weeks, and every request to it uses more electricity. If that electricity comes from fossil fuels, carbon emissions rise.
Water and resources: data centres use large amounts of water for cooling, and the specialist hardware needs rare metals to manufacture; old hardware adds to electronic waste.
Benefits: AI can cut energy use elsewhere, for example by controlling heating and cooling efficiently, balancing electricity grids that use wind and solar power, planning shorter delivery routes, and improving climate and weather forecasting.
Weighing up: a good answer compares both sides and reaches a judgement, for example that the impact depends on whether the data centre uses renewable energy and on how much the AI saves.
Worked example Discuss question
Discuss the environmental impact of using AI to manage traffic lights across a city.
Positive: the AI reduces queues and stop-start driving, so vehicles burn less fuel and emit less pollution.
Negative: the system needs servers, cameras and sensors that use electricity and materials to make, and the data centre needs cooling.
Judgement: if the fuel saved by thousands of vehicles each day is greater than the energy the system uses, the overall impact is positive.
Answer: A balanced answer with both sides and a reasoned conclusion.
Examiner trap
"AI is bad for the environment because it uses electricity" is a one-mark answer. Say what uses the energy (training, data centres, cooling), and balance it against the savings AI can make.
Stage 2 · Exam
Exam-style questions
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A hospital uses AI to read X-ray images. Which is a valid drawback?
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Which is an economic benefit of a factory using AI-controlled robots?
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Why might an AI system used for recruitment make unfair decisions?
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Which describes a way AI can REDUCE environmental impact?
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