Spring 2024 Scholarship Winner: Patrick Foulis
The BondExchange Scholarship is an essay contest that seeks to help currently enrolled college students and high school seniors pay for their education by awarding one student per semester $1,000 in financial assistance. The Spring 2024 BondExchange Scholarship recipient is Patrick Foulis, a student at Assumption University studying computer science and cybersecurity.
When asked why obtaining a college degree is important to him, Patrick said:
“For me, earning a degree embodies perseverance. At graduation, I will have obtained the essential technical skills required for a career in software engineering. However, what’s equally significant is the resilience gained through facing adversity. Juggling a double major and being a student-athlete will undoubtedly be difficult, but working through the difficulty during my academic journey will equip me to handle future obstacles outside of school. I’ll establish connections with like-minded individuals who share my passions throughout this process. And continuing my athletic career alongside teammates who share my love for baseball will be rewarding. The value of my degree will be not only in tangible technical skills but also in the networking opportunities that will come with a college degree.”
Check out Patrick’s essay below:
Prompt
How will artificial intelligence (AI) affect the insurance industry?
Answer
In a perfect world, all insurance claims and reviews are made off of the facts of the claim, and the facts of the contract at hand. There would be no exaggeration or fraud on behalf of the client who is filing for the insurance, and there would be no resistance to pay on behalf of the insurance company for a valid claim. However, this perfect world is fictional; we are humans, after all, and our emotions and motives get in the way of a perfect and fair system. This is natural and unavoidable when using human intelligence. However, artificial intelligence doesn’t have feelings, at least not the large language models that we have at our disposal at the moment, like Chat GPT. These large language models, at [their] most simplistic definition, take in an input and evaluate what word it should respond with based on the prompt and the previous word that it responded with. So, in summary, it is a calculation. There is no human emotion, there is no motive, just strictly a decision based on what is put in front of the algorithm. This will make it so that there are fewer fraudulent claims getting approved by insurance companies and fewer valid claims being denied or delayed. It will come down to an objective decision that is as close to the perfect world that we have ever been in.
The introduction of AI into the insurance industry with time for adaptation will drastically increase the effectiveness and fairness of the system. This is because it takes away the human element of human inelegance and cuts it down to a calculation. Creating a more fair, modern, and better industry than…before the introduction of artificial inelegance.