Why Artificial Intelligence will help white collar jobs.
Seems almost every day one sees commentary and articles decrying the death of the white collar job due to Artificial Intelligence (AI.) While it may make for good headlines, the truth is, what will actually happen can’t really be predicted at all. In fact, it is likely that AI will bring greater benefit to workers and result in more jobs. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution as knitting machines hit the world, it was decried that thousands of jobs would be lost and the industry collapse. In reality, more jobs were created and the UK economy became a powerhouse.
Understand where AI is in terms of being useful
While it’s easy to imagine a Terminator wandering the office and performing multiple tasks at blazing speeds, Ai of that type, known as “general AI” is decades off and may not even come to be. Today, AI is comprised of a number of technologies that are deployed singularly or sometimes combined. They include NLP (Natural Language Processing), Machine Learning and Neural Networks among others.
AI today is good at one thing and one thing only. And that is whatever its developers decide they want it to do. Fight traffic tickets or measure employee performance etc. AI also requires an immense amount of work to get to the point where it’s viable for a business to use. From a technical perspective, AI also requires a lot of processing power and immense amounts of Big Data to train it, then ongoing data to keep it being useful.
AI today is largely in the experimental phase with a lot of businesses and only accessible by enterprise level industry. Small businesses only get the benefit from SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) companies and startups.
In short, AI is a very, very long way from actually displacing thousands or millions of jobs and is still a very expensive proposition with little validated evidence of productivity gains. It’s getting better incredibly fast, but the role of AI for many years will be augmentation.
The augmented worker
What AI will really do is augment many jobs. Performing mundane, repetitive tasks and processes. AI may assist in making decisions, but as with any Information Technology, it will not actually make critical decisions. Serious business decisions will rely on humans for a long time yet. AI will augment workers and help them make much better decisions, and therein lies opportunity.
In the workplace, leveraging AI in high-process functions will enable employers to re-task employees (yes, some will lose their job) and likely gain improved productivity and greater job satisfaction. It’s going to be messy for a while, as any major technology coming to industry tends to bring messiness for the initial decade.
No information technology or other technology has resulted in industry collapse throughout history. AI may pose some degree of threat, the difference being that it enhances our cognitive strengths, whereas most technologies until now have enhanced our physical strength. This is the key difference that makes Ai a little less predictable in terms of impacts on economies and society.
But for the foreseeable future, AI will be an augmentation technology in most industries. Therein lie some exciting opportunities.
