Working with AI

What can workers do to combat the disruption AI will cause on the market? That depends on the institution or company a person works for and how well the company adopts the AI. Svetlana Sicular, a researcher at Garner believes that, like in the past, significant innovations such as AI will cause a temporary period of job loss, following by recovery and business transformation. Sicular believes that AI will improve the productivity of many businesses, which will in turn eliminate millions of middle and low-level positions, but on the same facet create millions of jobs in the highly skilled, or management market and even shifting some of the low or middle-level positions it will eliminate early. Sicular goes on to say that most just focus on the automation aspect of implementing AI while ignoring the augmentation (the actual intelligence part of AI) aspect creating a side by side workplace for people and AI as opposed to absolute replacement (Sicular, 2017, para. 4-5). AI has been used in workplaces for a long time to automate repetitive tasks, while more varied or work with lower repeatability cannot utilize AI as well. AI that is applied to non-routine work is more likely to assist a worker than it is to replace them outright. A combination of human and artificial intelligence will perform more effectively than either part on their own (Gartner, 2017, para. 7; Rollings & Gartner, 2017, para. 13). Rotman (2013) reports, John Leonard, a professor at MIT says: “Many of the traditional problems in robotics—such as how to teach a machine to recognize an object as, say, a chair—remain largely intractable and are especially difficult to solve when the robots are free to move about a relatively unstructured environment like a factory or office…” he goes on to say “Part of me sees accelerating progress; the other part of me sees the same old problems, I see how hard it is to do anything with robots. The big challenge is uncertainty.” Essentially meaning that people are still far better at dealing with changes in their environment and reacting to unexpected events. For that reason, Leonard believes it is easier to see how robots could work with humans as opposed to replacing them in several different applications. Leonard goes on to say that AI causing a total replacement is likely to take far longer to arise (Rotman, 2013, para. 22-24). When discussing AI, the benefits of working hand in hand with the technology is usually lost in the opinions of good versus bad. People often do not look at the value AI can create and how it can compliment humans in a positive way. Alan Kay, a computer pioneer, once said "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." meaning with AI development, we should invent with principles, for a bright future. Nadella talks of Cynthia Breazeal who says we mush have principles and goals when designing AI. Breazeal believes that in order to collaborate with AI in a meaningful way we should be cautious in how it is designed. It should be designed to assist, be transparent in the working of the technology, have intelligent privacy, accountability, and guarding against bias (Nadella, 2016, para. 12-17). This is to say that a ethical and empathic framework for the design of AI will be incredibly important if we are to benefit comfortably from a mainstream spread.