Human + AI: The Future of Work Symphony
By Sangeetha Viswanathan, Assistant Professor, BITS Pilani WILP
The transformation that AI has brought about in our personal and professional lives has undoubtedly been profound, especially in recent years. Global connectivity and intercommunication continues to be one of the primary areas, which has been significantly influenced by AI. However, AI has also made a considerable impact on healthcare, business, education, manufacturing, and many other areas. No wonder that according to Gartner, 37% of organizations have already implemented AI in some form or the other — a staggering 270% increase over the last four years.
AI revolution is indeed real as many of us embrace it already.
From the time we wake up in the morning, going about our everyday routine, AI does drive as much of it already for many of us, be it in our decision-amaking, planning, or information seeking. AI assists us in many walks of life, either in writing mails, commuting between places, or getting basic movie recommendations. Some other examples of AI’s usage in everyday lives are:
Facial recognition technology
Voice assistance
Driverless cars
Robotic chefs
Digital healthcare
Smart homes
Financial credit decision-making services
Security and surveillance
Heavy industries and manufacturing
AI’s impact on certain jobs is here to stay
While AI posing an immediate threat to replacing human intelligence entirely is not fathomable, we still cannot ignore the impact that AI has already had on certain jobs in various fields. According to a research report from PwC, by the mid-2030s, one-third of the employment across many industries may likely be automated. The blue-collared workers might be the most affected out of this automation.
The rise of automation started right from the 16th century when a priest William Lee automated a part of the stocking-making process. Since then, over the years, applications of AI rose in textile, manufacturing, automobiles, and many more areas. Recently, because of COVID19 pandemic, there was a surge in humanoid robots to minimize human contact. According to a research report by an MIT and Boston economist, robots can replace 2 million humans by 2025 in the manufacturing industry alone. You have robots that can replace waitressing and help with the surveillance in airports, chatbots, automated butler robots, bricklaying robots, and many more. Many tasks that were handled by humans are being mechanized. However, this does not mean that the complete workforce across industries is going to be replaced with machines and robots.
Can AI replace human intelligence completely?
Over the last several months, there has been this constant thought among many of us: “Will AI make my profession or role obsolete?” Have we really reached the point of inflection with the advances of AI, where every job can be replaced by AI?
Well, at the core, AI is all about making intelligent machines that perceive, reason, and make decisions like humans. AI has undoubtedly made remarkable strides exercising all its potential in different areas of applications. However, AI systems still lack consciousness and self-awareness, and need human supervision and data to make the best of their abilities.
Although statements like “ChatGPT bot passes law exams” or “AI tool was used to recreate the authentic art forms” might strengthen the claim that AI will soon outsmart human intelligence and exhibit limitless potential, the fact is that these AI systems are still dependent on their trained knowledge and data. They still require considerable human intervention to tailor the final response and they definitely cannot empathize with the human experience with the social and physical world.
AI is creating new job prospects … more than it is wrecking
Among the different applications of AI in many fields, new job roles are being created. In a prediction survey by the World Economic Forum, though AI is expected to replace 85 million jobs by 2025, it is also expected to create approximately 97 million new job roles.
In the manufacturing sector, the assembly process can be automated, thereby creating opportunities in the design control and management sectors. There is a constant need for data analysts, model engineers, and machine learning scientists, as AI models rely considerably on data and infrastructure. Since AI models need to be fact-checked periodically, there is a need for special data researchers. As we navigate through the AI driven world embracing the opportunities all through, we must also understand the challenges and limitations of AI.
Key challenges with AI — Adapting to humans!
There are many limitations for AI, such as the need for data, limitless learning, and bias-free scenarios. A standard range of AI algorithms take time to adapt to the changes, because of the requirement to be trained, thereby inhibiting any outside-the-box thinking. Not to forget the immense amount of training required to build a model, which in turn needs a lot of data, raising privacy and security concerns. Research estimated that the electricity cost for a single supercharged AI language model was approximately $4.5 million. In addition to this, AI models are susceptible to bias due to designer’s imbalances or implicit imbalances. A model trained with biased data is definitely going to be biased, failing to exhibit its 100 % efficiency.
How to deal with AI anxiety?
In the recent years, we saw some AI programs outsmarting human intelligence, thereby instilling the AI anxiety among us. Jerri Lynn Hogg, a media psychologist and former president of the American Psychological Association’s Society for Media Psychology and Technology says, “It is natural that we are afraid of new technology, but understanding the tech and learning to work with it might be a better way to handle technostress.”
AI is already here and is about to stay for the long future. So how about we try to upskill ourselves, catch up on the different regulations of implementing AI, and prepare ourselves for new career prospects. Physiologically, let’s be prepared to deal with uncertainty and lean into more of human capabilities. Since AI is not good with dealing with soft skills or people skills, perhaps it would be a good idea to embrace human skills. Educate yourself more about AI. There are a lot of long-term and crash courses offered by academic institutions, not just in AI algorithms, but also in ethical usage of AI, strategizing AI models, Securing AI models, and so on. Organizations must help manpower to upskill themselves to eliminate the phrase “humans or computers” to rather make it “humans and computers.” Identify potential areas to upskill and diversify the learning.