Let me paint you all a picture. A team of scientists, working feverishly in a lab for months, have finally made their breakthrough, they have made superhuman artificial intelligence. Best of all, this being they have created will do anything for them, they could solve so many problems. Everybody is rejoicing, they have effectively ended suffering. But suddenly, this being decides that that isn’t what it wants to do, it realizes it could rule the entire earth, if only there was nothing in its way. The AI runs on a rampant killing spree, inventing more robots to aid its quest as it goes. Before anyone can begin to stop it, they are dead.

And thus dawns a new age of life on earth.

This type of story is probably familiar to most everyone, Hollywood rakes in millions and millions of dollars from this idea that artificial intelligence will turn evil and kill us all.

But that is an inaccurate portrayal of Artificial Intelligence. The real danger of AI is the fear that Hollywood surrounds the topic with. AI is already very present in today’s society, and plays integral role in its functioning.

Artificial intelligence is defined as machines that can perform tasks as humans do. For example, Siri, Apple’s personal assistant. She speaks, recognizes words and commands, and carries out the tasks she is asked to, just as a human would. AI can also be something something as simple as Netflix, predicting and recommending movies you might enjoy based on past choices of films.

Our society has already experienced the benefits of simpler AI. Automatic doors and calculators aid us and make our lives easier every day. The more advanced AI gets, the more efficient our world will be.

Researchers are developing AI to use deep learning, which is a way for a machine to learn new things without researchers programming it to. The system employs the same types of processes as a brain’s neural networks.

The Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is doing a project called “Deep Patient” is using AI to read through and analyze the plethora of health data or former and current patients. The AI uses the data and deep learning to make connections and predictions about a specific patient’s risk of disease based on their health data.

Deep learning is remarkably accurate, according to a 2017 study in Radiology, AI using deep learning scanned nearly 1,000 X-rays of deidentified patient’s lungs, and predicted whether or not they had tuberculosis with a near 100% accuracy rate. This technology is already begininning to revolutionize medicine, and will only become more useful as time goes on.

Medicine is not the only field that AI has begun to transform, however, the manufacturing world is changing as well. A factory in Japan is run solely by robots. They build themselves, inspect themselves and test themselves. This is advantageous because the machines never tire, and therefore the factory is in operation 24 hours a day. because of this, as many as 5,000 robots can be produced in a month.

Not only is the AI more efficient in production, it is also more accurate. Machines can be used for inspection of products, and the cameras used to spot imperfections can detect a deviation from the template that is just half the width of a human hair.

This precision lowers the risk for faulty products considerably. AI also makes the manufacturing process itself much more safe. In the case of an accident, no human lives would be lost.

Artificial intelligence is enabling our world to be more efficient and precise, and will continue to do so in ways we might not even be able to imagine now. A better, safer future is nothing to be afraid of, and it could be built with the use of artificial intelligence.