Will AI kill your job?

Oh, what will happen to our jobs when my company starts using AI?

This is such a popular question that comes up during talks – even to a pseudo-technical audience.

Not surprisingly, this question brings a sarcastic smile to the faces of some data scientists and artificial intelligence experts; You might even catch a glimpse.

But it’s a valid question.

Don’t forget, we had a US political candidate for president on the topic that automation is taking people away from good jobs and that we should compensate for the crisis. Popular figures take it to extremes and claim that artificial intelligence will take over humanity very soon.

All this buzz around automation and artificial intelligence is sure to make people shudder; A technology they don’t understand well is trying Pull the rug out from under their feet. Even worse, this technology has the potential to destroy them, some believe.

The fear is real.

Americans fear a future where artificial intelligence becomes too intelligent, according to a survey by Oxford University’s Artificial Intelligence Governance Center. When people were asked what kind of impact machine intelligence would have on humanity, 34 percent thought it would be negative, while 12 percent were positive. human extinction!

Here comes the question Will AI *really* replace our jobs and later us?

The answer is difficult. This story has several parts.

As a reminder, the goal of artificial intelligence is to imitate human intelligence and decision-making in a computer, using computer algorithms. Given the computing power, learning algorithms and data we have today, there are many repetitive tasks performed by humans that can be offloaded to AI. At least AI can help humans with these tasks.

For example, AI systems can be taught to handle simple customer support requests, detect defects in manufactured products, and even investigate the possibility of fraud. Once these AI systems are trained, they can perform these tasks more efficiently, faster, and sometimes even with higher accuracy. So, of course, specific jobs, especially decision-making jobs that are also time-consuming, can be “replaced.” But not in the way you think.

Remember that when AI systems fail or make mistakes, you still need humans to fix the problems. You also need people to provide quality assurance – essentially becoming the overseer of these AI systems. Additionally, because AI systems today rely heavily on data to learn how to perform tasks, you still need humans in the loop to generate high-quality data. More importantly, there will be functions around “stolen” work that no single AI can do alone, such as reporting progress, finding areas for improvement, managing team members, etc.

So ultimately, while tasks that used to be handled by the entire team can now be augmented by AI, the roles within your team may change. Humans can become operational supervisors, AI trainers and quality assurance managers.

Eventually, teams may be reduced. But teams can also stay the same for years while their roles change. In some cases, teams may grow due to the demands of other related roles. Nevertheless, humans play an important role in AI-enhanced workflows.

AI systems are task-oriented machines. If you train these machines to perform a number of tasks, they will do very well. For example, if you teach a machine learning algorithm to detect breast cancer by asking it to read thousands of mammogram images, it will do it like a radiologist. At the same time, the same AI system will not be able to detect other types of cancer, unlike a radiologist who can detect other related cancers.

We must agree that AI systems today lack common sense, the ability to effectively construct knowledge, read between the lines, and use logic like humans. Although humans are born with such innate abilities, artificial intelligence systems today rely heavily on samples in the data.

Even the famous GPT-3, a massive language prediction model that seems to do everything, including completing computer source code, answering questions, predicting moods, writing articles, etc. When you trick him with illogical questions, he gives illogical answers. That’s because he was trained to learn obvious Samples from vast amounts of data, not conceptualized knowledge, which is more abstract.

For example, if you ask GPT-3, “How many eyes does your leg have?”, it will answer, “Your foot has two eyes” (see examples here). On the contrary, a two-year-old child will quickly tell you that his feet have no eyes!

My point here is that while AI systems can perform complex tasks, currently, they are very task-oriented machines. Artificial intelligence is far from performing human reasoning in the general sense. If one of the more sophisticated AI systems can’t tell you that legs don’t have eyes, do you really think AI robots can plan to completely take over humanity? The technology for general human reasoning does not yet exist due to its complexity, and may not for the next few decades. Still, that doesn’t diminish the fact that task-oriented AI systems can already enhance human life in many ways.

As we all saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, a 100% human workforce is risky and may no longer be suitable for the world we live in today. Workers quit in large numbers to either care for their home-schooled children, fearing the virus itself, or realizing that many jobs weren’t worth the risk. This caused a is decreasing labor force participation that has already been happening over the past few decades due to population aging and other factors.

US labor force participation over the years

This means that many unfilled jobs will remain. It may also mean that many businesses will not survive without an alternative. If enough people don’t want to work in roles that were fully filled just a decade ago, companies must compensate.

Automation will become necessary.

We’re already seeing much of this play out in pharmacies and grocery stores across the United States, where vending machines with powerful software have become more the norm since the COVID-19 pandemic. This is just the beginning. As more and more businesses embrace the digital world and fewer people want to work in roles that previous generations were comfortable working in, there will be a greater need for software automation. Whether companies use AI, RPA or simple software automation all depends on the context.

final word

So, in short, to answer the question of whether jobs will be lost due to artificial intelligence, the answer is – maybe. But what is more certain will be the nature of certain jobs gradually to change Instead of doing everything manually, we will slowly be assisted by artificial intelligence tools. We can also become quality assurance managers and data generators for artificial intelligence systems. And what about the takeover of artificial intelligence? Well, that’s probably not even an issue this decade—until we get a hopeful look at the study of artificial intelligence as it relates to common sense reasoning.

The original post can be found here: Will Artificial Intelligence Kill Your Job?

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