The promise and perils of artificial intelligence: Overcoming the odds

Artificial Intelligence has been received with both great enthusiasm and great concern. From a positive perspective, IBM's CEO, Ginni Rometty, stated, "It will be a partnership between a man and machine. It is a very symbiotic relationship that you are conversing with this technology. Our purpose is to augment and really be in service of what humans do" (N. Singh, 2017). In contrast, other tech executives have reacted like Bill Gates, who stated that "[h]umans should be worried about the threat posed by artificial Intelligence" (Rawlinson, 2015). Many academic researchers have voiced their concerns about the disappearance of jobs, with machines replacing workers (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2015). Yet beyond the enthusiasm and the concerns, there has been an increased interest in AI in all areas of human endeavor. In manufacturing, for example, the number of publications related to AI has grown from about 500 in 2010 to more than 2,000 in 2020 (Arinez et al., 2020), and this trend can also be seen in other areas where AI is being incorporated. A 2003 study from Filippi et al. found exponential growth in the number of papers focusing on AI. (...)