Over the past few years, artificial intelligence (AI) has changed the world. With its rapid pace of development, AI has influenced most aspects of daily life. Some of the most notable changes are in local businesses, from AI-driven expansion to the replacement of positions once dominated by humans.
Junior Diego Lopez’s mother works at 23andMe, which uses AI as a primary tool for efficiency and development. “My mom’s business [position] uses existing models, which is to say things like ChatGPT and Claude, from scanning their emails to look for action items to building helpful programs within the company,” Lopez said. “AI has been able to enhance its company’s productivity and help it finish work projects faster for its customers.”
Despite the efficiency gains from AI, Lopez noted that, along with the positives, corporate use of AI has also damaged public reputation. “People tend to see AI and attribute it to a lazy company with lazy workers, which isn’t true,” Lopez said.
Randy Phelps, a Chief Technology Officer at Apple, shared a similar perspective. Phelps noted that businesses use AI to enhance productivity and significantly expand revenue. “We had a paper and pen process that we used for years, which limited the amount of money we could recoup from the federal government,” he said. “With the help of AI to simplify the process, we increased our federal government compensation by 40 million dollars in the first year, and we think it will rise to 50 to 55 million in the next two years and continue in perpetuity, so, a huge win.”
Phelps argued that AI is excellent at reducing the dullness of redundant tasks. “It resolves repetitive tasks that most employees find mind-numbing. It never gets tired, never needs a break, never has a bad day,” Phelps said. “It is like the most eager intern, brilliant, energetic, and tireless, but you have to keep an eye on their work, as they are inexperienced and will not know nuances the way professionals will.”
In the future, Phelps believes that AI will transform life beyond businesses and basic technology. “It will allow all citizens of the planet the ability to truly self-determine the role they’d like to serve. All that AI can become, but in the wrong hands, it could lead to destruction and chaos. We will pick,” he said.
Nueva School junior Hannah Barek, who describes AI as more of a burden than an asset to her parents’ business, believes that AI lacks the accuracy and precision of a human being with specialized training.
“What AI can do for businesses, such as make a design for a potential product, could never be as accurate as even a quick sketch from a human could be, because they have specialized skills in that field,” Barek said.
Barek believes the use can negatively impact diligence and knowledge within companies. “This AI change is negative because it causes the quality of work to decrease, and many people no longer know what they are talking about,” she said.
Erik Vinkhuyzen formerly worked on self-driving cars at Nissan’s research center in California as a Senior Researcher and Manager of Human Machine Interaction, which employed numerous AI software applications. He explained that AI has helped to realize possibilities that never seemed plausible. “We were never able to make a truly self-driving car, but the technologies used for self-driving slowly made their way into the top-end cars,” Vinkhuyzen said.
Vinkhuyzen also mentioned that the advances AI has enabled come with potential downsides. “It is very expensive to develop an AI that can truly replace a human 100%. Even Waymo has a lot of human support working in the background,” Vinkhuyzen said. “Self-driving cars are very expensive to make, so it is yet to be determined whether this will be a very profitable application.”
“It is still best seen as a tool for people rather than a new form of conscious life, as some people claim AI will be soon,” he said.
Vinkhuyzen is uncertain about whether the benefits of AI truly outweigh the costs. “For businesses that are just interested in making even more money and seek to eliminate human labor, AI can be a very useful tool, but it is less obvious to me that society as a whole benefits from this process. I am more concerned than optimistic,” he said.
“AI can be a useful technology, a hit, if it is seen as an aid to people, but it is mostly a miss if you think that it can completely replace people,” Vinkhuyzen said.
Overall, many see AI as a benefit to the workplace, rapidly improving productivity and income, and helping achieve new heights that would otherwise seem impossible given prior technological limitations. Despite this, others worry that companies will use AI to replace sentient human beings who need careers and income, and that one day, AI will dominate the corporations that once started with humans.
