By Riordan Craig

Police Scotland’s plan to use AI for facial recognition purposes is yet another step forward in the use of technology.

And one expert academic believes the implementation of artificial intelligence is simply the latest step forward in work-based evolution.

Police Scotland intend on using Artificial Intelligence for facial recognition in the future, but it is already familiar to students and education fields around the world.

UWS Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing, Theo Tzanidis, said: “It’s a commercial entity. It’s not the government, but when the government and the police want to facially recognise people, to be able to protect you, then I believe that becomes another conversation all together because if you don’t trust the government, you don’t trust anyone.

“There’s a big question about whether you’re suggesting that there shouldn’t be any type of progress in technology because, why?”

There are many benefits to using AI and the academic highlighted that it could be used to alert the relevant authorities that someone is going to have a heart attack, so they could be fully prepared to help.

However, there are many risks to using AI as it still lacks human-like creativity which makes it difficult to use AI for things that require a human element, such as news articles.

A common belief is that AI could, one day, take everyone’s jobs, with recent reports suggesting using AI for sports commentaries.

However, Theo takes a different view adding: “There were people that, I mean the farmers, thought they’d be replaced and are replaced. But it was a gradual replacing over the course of the first industrial revolution.

“To produce more food they are able to actually increase the production, become more efficient. The people working in the field were replaced by machines. But these people didn’t stop working, they work elsewhere.”

Theo concluded the “genie’s out of the bottle” and it will never go back in.