AI and the workplace

What impact will AI have on the world of work over the next 10-15 years?

The world of today is rapidly changing, and we expect to see an incredible change in the coming decade, thanks to AI. Let’s not forget that one of the positive effects of the pandemic is that people are becoming more reliant on technology, are learning to live online and are no longer shy of technology. This circumstance in itself leads more people to use and ultimately trust technology. Employers too are undergoing such a mental change. For the first time in their lives, their business is grinding to a halt!

In the coming years, AI will not necessarily replace entire jobs, but it will take over specific tasks. It has already started replacing these tasks, and this will keep on accelerating in the coming years. According to the World Economic Forum, in 5 years, automation will account for more than 50% of the tasks in existence. We believe there are four potential scenarios which we should consider:

Some jobs like the caring profession (nurses, doctors and others), the creative industry (actors, musicians and others) will not be affected much by AI because AI is still not very good at these tasks.

Other jobs will become obsolete. These include drivers (because of the rise of self-driving cars), factory workers (because of automation) and many others.

Many new jobs will emerge. These are the jobs which we haven’t even invented. It could include services like Organ Creator whereby people design new organs (such as a new heart, kidney or liver) which would replace defective ones.

Most of the existent jobs will change since AI technologies will augment their fundamental tasks. The effect of this will be massive. It might be as small as helping stackers in a supermarket identify expired products using augmented reality, up to assisting a surgeon during an operation.

What will or won’t AI do?

AI is extremely good at handling repetitive tasks at an incredible speed and with amazing precision. Because of this, it can easily replace almost any task which has these characteristics. Just think of a self-driving car, the driver has to look at what’s happening around him (repetitive job), he has to notice any anomalies immediately (at incredible speed) and take decisive action (with amazing precision). By looking at these characteristics, one can quickly identify whether a particular job is at risk or not.

On the other hand, AI is still not good at handling people. When people communicate, they do so not only through speech but also through social norms. Things like turn-taking, gesturing, showing empathy and many other unwritten rules. These are things which we learn as we grow within a community. But for a machine, these things are not natural since it lacks social context, and someone has to teach them to it. Human-Computer interaction made giant leaps in the past decade, but we’re still far from achieving the naturalness of human communication. One can’t expect to get a robot to take care of a human patient because it will not be able to handle the situation, not the medical side of course but rather the human side of it.

Why should specialists be worried about AI?

Specialisation has always been the domain of humans because to achieve it; one needed years of studying combined with experience. However, the tables are now turning. The internet contains much information, thus allowing AI systems to process that information and learn from it. This process is equivalent to having a human studying and gaining experience over time. The only difference is that for a machine, this happens within a few hours or days. If we just look at one example, in 2018, a group of 20 lawyers specialising in corporate law were pitted against an AI. They were each provided with five non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), and they had to identify any faults. The lawyers, on average, took one and a half hours to complete the task and achieved 85% accuracy. The legal AI, on the other hand, obtained 94% accuracy in 26 seconds. The difference is massive, and it shows that every job, even high paid jobs, will be affected by AI. Of course, we will not be seeing robot lawyers debating in the courtroom any time soon, but AI systems will start assisting lawyers in their regular tasks.

What can managers do to keep up with the times?

Malcolm X once said that “the future belongs to those who prepare for it today”. Some people are already dreaming and engineering the solutions of tomorrow. The technology is ripe, we have the processing power, and there is finally the political will to embrace the AI revolution. It is only a matter of time before it takes over. So Managers need to take the first step and learn about AI. If in doubt, they should seek an AI expert, and they’ll probably be surprised at the enormous savings which AI can bring to their organisation. The process in itself is rather straightforward as well, and it follows some well-defined steps. First of all, it is important to start educating people about what is AI.

The education process has to start from the very top, down to all the levels of the organisational hierarchy. Second, the organisation undergoes an AI readiness audit to ascertain the state of the organisation with regards to adopting AI. Then, a consultation process is carried out with all the stakeholders to identify potential AI case studies.

These case studies are then ordered together with management based upon feasibility, the investment required and potential returns. Then management simply decides which projects to implement. Whether they are implemented in-house or outsourced, really depends on the complexity and the expertise available in the organisation.

AI experts will be there to oversee the running of the project. On completion, another more ambitious project is selected and executed. The cycle continues like that until the organisation manages to augment its processes with AI.

How will the future of work look?

Work as we know it will gradually change. Reliance on automation will increase exponentially, and we will forget how things happened in the past. Just think of a smartphone; it replaces a landline, answering machine, a camera, an alarm clock, a satellite navigation system, a scanner, a music player, a calculator, a TV and loads of other stuff. Young people have probably never seen some of these old devices unless they visited an antique museum.

The same will happen with AI. Our software will get an injection of AI features capable of processing vast amounts of data. The computer will become omnipresent; no longer housed in a small box but accessible from anywhere within a location. The interface will be easier for anyone, allowing seamless human-like voice interaction. So work will shift from the harvesting, processing and presentation of information towards the management of AI services which will take over most of these tasks on our behalf. With sophisticated robots on their way, even manual tasks will switch towards semi-manual tasks. Automation will also make a lot of manual processes redundant. Where this is not possible, exoskeletons will help humans carry heavy loads without running the risk of jeopardising their health.

What is the most impressive artificial intelligence we have today, in your opinion?

The most impressive AI today is without doubt computer vision. It is the single subfield of AI where the computer manages to beat human levels consistently. Be it the identification of cancerous cells in medical images, the recognition of objects or people in a video, or just interpreting the road for self-driving cars, computer vision made giant leaps in the past decade.

Without doubt, this would not have been possible without the progress in deep learning algorithms. However, these algorithms will soon reach their limits, and thus, researchers are always on the lookout for possible improvements.

The unique technology which is extremely promising and which will allow these algorithms to go beyond what we can even imagine is without doubt quantum computing. Just to give an example of its immense power, Google managed to use quantum computing on a particular mathematical problem. The system managed to solve it in slightly more than 3 minutes. This result is an immense improvement considering that the most powerful supercomputer in existence today would take approximately 10,000 years to accomplish the same task!

Will artificial intelligence eliminate or increase jobs in the future?

It is hard to come up with a ballpark figure of whether AI will eliminate or increase jobs. AI experts claim that it will kill more than 40% of all the posts in existence today within the coming decade. If we factor in the effects of the pandemic, this figure is most probably an understatement. On the other hand, the World Economic Forum predicts that AI will create at least 133 million new roles. These are new jobs which do not even exist today.

Furthermore, let us not forget that the IT industry does not operate in isolation and needs many support roles such as visual artists, copywriters and several others. Thus, to reach this correct figure, this amount should be at least quadrupled. If we were to aggregate everything together, the official estimates indicate that AI will most probably create 45% more jobs than it kills. So the future does look bright in general. This prospect does not mean that everything will be plain sailing. Many people will still need to retrain and reskill to thrive in the new job market, but with the help of AI-enabled tools, it will be much simpler than before.   

Do you believe that artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence?

Intelligence is an attribute which is hard to define. So much so that we do not have a coherent definition for it, yet us humans are extremely good at labelling intelligent beings. Typically, we associate tasks with those that a human can do so if another animal or a machine can replicate those actions, then we label them intelligent.

If you take individual tasks such as playing chess, analysing a video feed and many others, AI is not only better than humans but in some instances, it also reached superhuman level.

This notion is referred to as narrow AI because it is capable of handling close tasks exceptionally well. However, if you were to ask an AI Chess Grandmaster to relate the current weather in New York, the system fails miserably because the request goes beyond its designed functions.

To surpass human intelligence, we need Artificial General Intelligence. This intelligence is similar to the human one and can handle multiple different requests simultaneously. Although there has been much research in the past decades, the reality is that we are still very far away. Of course, this might all change with the rise of new algorithms and technologies like quantum computing.