Artificial intelligence (AI) has permanently changed the way we interact with technology. It has provided countless opportunities for problem-solving in the last decade and will continue to do so in the coming decades. Today AI has been studying your browsing history; Amazon recommends items based on your browsing and purchase history, Facebook presents you with targeted ads based on your browsing history and YouTube displays videos based on your browsing history. AI based smartphone apps respond to queries, recognize faces in photographs, can detect music, objects and help you remember where you parked your car. The relationship between artificial intelligence and reduction in poverty and overpopulation may be one worth fostering.

AI can be used to help solve some of the world’s biggest social and economic issues of our day. In fact, scientists are now planning to use AI’s capabilities in the fight against poverty and overpopulation —what the world calls today’s greatest global challenge. A million historical facts only prove that humans are largely mediocre and often fail to do things that will help them lead a better life. AI puts us in a better position to solve issues we’ve never been able to solve due to this mediocrity. AI based assistants like Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google Assistant are still babies, but they will be the predecessors of super-intelligent advisory systems in the next decade. Voice will become the next-generation command interface, besides gesture, brain-computer and augmented reality to mention a few. Technology will soon have the capability of curing deadly injuries, replace our limbs and organs, or give us sensory abilities far beyond existing vision, hearing, and manipulation.

Today, AI is also deployed to find impoverished areas, improve agriculture techniques, make our planet greener and help government’s reduce overpopulation. This is just a start, here are dozens of other ways that AI can help alleviate poverty and starkly reduce overpopulation. People have blamed AI for stealing jobs and rightly so. Unfortunately, what we don’t realize is the real issue that we’re not making investments in the things that we should and instead we are making investment in things that are not really needed now. We also fail to realize that overpopulation is destroying the future of the next generation. This increase in global population and aging of centuries-old infrastructure will lead to rapid depletion of resources and old-world energy shortages will resurface.

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has said AI could be the best or the worst event in the history of civilization. We could either use it for reducing population, creating billions of forests, helping us live a better life by making advancements in medicine, producing cleaner air and creating better food or use it in a destructive way to favor a few capitalist billionaires who don’t care about this planet or our own survival. Slowly but steadily people are beginning to harness AI for helping the poor and reducing overpopulation wherever it exists and the work so far sounds promising. Let us not forget that poverty and overpopulation are interrelated. Poverty is one of the leading causes of overpopulation along with illiteracy and ignorance. A lack of educational resources, coupled with high death rates leading to higher birth rates, result in impoverished areas experiencing booms in population growth. We must make a choice, either we reduce poverty and overpopulation or we will eliminate human existence on this planet over the coming hundred years.