As a society, we are sometimes faced with many challenges that are too difficult or overwhelming to endure. For some, mental math is quick and efficient; others, such as accountants that have to keep track of a lot of numbers prefer using a calculator. The machine is never wrong, save for human input error. Gold, oil, money — and the new currency of information that is more valuable than ever before in human history. The use of computers and artificial intelligence to help us keep track of our important information is an easy way of going about such a grand task. The impacts of new cloud computing interfaces — such as machine learning and cognitive services — could be a gateway to a brighter educational and academic future.
I’m sure you have had to go through the typical moment at school where attendance is taken — correct? Well, what if I told you that no one ever had to go through that again. It’s certainly possible, with the help of machine learning and cognitive services generated by cloud computing. Place a camera into the doorways of a classroom, and the machine would generate a list of faces and compare them against the attendance list — and huzzah! — no more “Bueller. . . Bueller. . .” moments ever again. This would greatly increase overall classroom efficiency, and facial recognition software could be used to save time during attendance, quizzes, and exams. Now, like me, you might be thinking, “no way!” because now you’ll never be able to skip class, but isn’t that for the better? Our faces are already likely to be in a database somewhere, if not posted by ourselves onto social media — so why not let one more machine have access to what we look like, in order to help us to use the little time that we have on this Earth as efficiently as possible.
Along those same lines, I’d like to point out that cloud computing is already being used in a variety of ways today, but for now we’ll be mainly focusing on the impacts of use in academia. These cognitive services allow inputs of large datasets and output results and decisions that are quite accurate. Although, I’m not sure how far we should let artificial intelligence go. Today, we are living in a surveillance state — and the powers that be may use the opportunity that artificial intelligence provides to do their work for them. Picture this, an idea taken from the TV show Person of Interest: a machine that has access to all security cameras, text messages, phone calls, and any conversation near a technological piece of equipment. An all-seeing, information-processing AI. In this situation, we may be able to program this machine to prevent harm to others — namely school shooters — as the domestic terrorism epidemic continues. While humans cannot effectively stop all harmful actions — we may be able to program a device that could alert us when it detects suspicious activity or wrongdoing. The impacts of such machine learning on a massive scale may be too complex to understand, but especially for schools this tool would be a great opportunity to catch problems such as possible cheating and aggressive actions before they were to occur.
Moving forward, we are sure to see more machine learning and cognitive services taking on new roles in workplaces and in academia. Machine brains, capable of storing and processing tons of information — could be used to do extraordinary things. As a final note, there are still many uninvented uses for these machines built on the cloud, and I suggest that everyone try to create something revolutionary with them.
