AS · Practice questions · The impact of artificial intelligence

Weigh it up.

Six original Cambridge-style questions on artificial intelligence and its impact, with mark points.

Original questions All questions on this page are original work, written in the Cambridge AS & A Level style. They are not from past papers. They test the same concepts and skills the syllabus rewards.

Keep these straight

Social, economic, environmental.

AI: a computer system doing tasks that normally need human intelligence, often by learning from data.
Social: health, safety, accessibility, bias, privacy, deepfakes, accountability.
Economic: productivity, costs, new jobs and lost jobs, retraining, who gains the wealth.
Environmental: energy, water, hardware and e-waste, against efficiency savings; give both sides and a judgement.

Recall

[2 marks]

State what is meant by artificial intelligence.

The ability of a computer system to carry out tasks that would normally need human intelligence ... ✓
... such as learning from data, reasoning, recognising images or speech, or understanding language. ✓

Recall

[3 marks]

Identify three applications of artificial intelligence.

Medical diagnosis from scans. ✓
Autonomous (self-driving) vehicles. ✓
Voice assistants, chatbots or translation (or face recognition, fraud detection, recommendation systems, robotics, expert systems). ✓

Explain

[4 marks]

A city introduces self-driving taxis that use AI. Explain two social impacts of this change.

Safety: the AI does not get tired or distracted, so there may be fewer accidents ... ✓
... but if it fails it may be unclear who is responsible for an accident. ✓
Access: people who cannot drive, such as disabled or elderly people, can travel more independently ... ✓
... (or privacy: cameras record people and places continuously, so there is less privacy). ✓

Explain

[4 marks]

A bank replaces many of its customer service staff with an AI chatbot. Discuss the economic impact.

Benefit: lower wage costs, so higher profit or lower fees. ✓
Benefit: the chatbot answers customers 24 hours a day and handles many at once. ✓
Drawback: staff lose their jobs and may need retraining for new roles. ✓
Drawback: high cost to develop, train and maintain the chatbot; new jobs are created in AI and support, but fewer than are lost. ✓

Analysis

[4 marks]

Discuss the environmental impact of the growing use of AI.

Training and running AI models in data centres uses large amounts of electricity, increasing carbon emissions if it comes from fossil fuels. ✓
Data centres use water for cooling, and specialist hardware uses rare materials and creates e-waste. ✓
AI can reduce energy use elsewhere, for example efficient heating, route planning or balancing renewable energy on the grid. ✓
Reasoned judgement, e.g. the overall impact depends on the energy source and on whether the savings exceed the energy used. ✓

Apply

[3 marks]

A loan company uses AI to decide whether to lend money to applicants. Explain why this raises ethical concerns.

If the AI is trained on past data containing bias, it may unfairly reject some groups. ✓
Applicants may not be told why they were rejected, as the AI's reasoning can be hard to explain (lack of transparency). ✓
It is unclear who is accountable for a wrong decision, and the company collects a lot of personal data (privacy). ✓

Mark this once you have attempted all six and checked your working. It records a Practiced badge on the topic and adds a one-time bonus. Revealing the solutions alone does not count.