Ziga Kuhar
Jul 30, 2017 · 2 min read

Was it good or bad who knows. As long as no one died it wasn’t that bad. Looking at the issue more broadly, can you imagine how many jobs were lost due to internet? It disrupted every industry on the planet. And one could make an argument that email displaced a lot of postmen, because everything used to be sent by post, now most business and all private correspondence is send by email. But I’ve never heard anyone make that argument. Internet also opened up so many new sectors, potential for companies, the gig economy, freelancing, peer to peer businesses, using the internet anyone can start a business in 5 minutes. Your computers displaced 450 jobs but the IT sector in general opened millions if not billions of new jobs.

So before we jump to conclusions and make doomsday predictions about job loss we need to look at ourselves. If we can’t imagine how to avoid massive job loss that’s a failure of our imagination. Could anyone in 1800s imagine all the jobs computers will bring? Maybe a select few visionaries, everyone else would have professed a doomsday scenario had they been told what computers will become. But today we can’t imagine a life without computers.

With AI new jobs will open up where it currently makes no economic sense for a company to do business using human employees. However if cost of that service/product drops 90% because its produced by AI, it will attract massive interest from the public.

Also before we start freaking out about job loss we need to take another thing into consideration. What is a job? Jobs will be lost, but we need to shift what we perceive as a job. People used to do the same job for 40 years until they retired. We need to transform what jobs mean to us and bring it into the 21st century, jobs suddenly became very dynamic and I wouldn’t be surprised if most employed people of the future are self employed. Jeff Bezos put it very well “we will learn any skill in order to serve our customers better.” I think a lot more people need to start thinking along those lines and be willing to do that. Instead most people today are stuck in the old “I studied X so I will do Y until I retire.” Those days are gone, and people who don’t see the shift has already happened have a lot of catching up to do.

I wish the main stream media put things into more perspective, instead they’re doing just the opposite. For every positive article about AI there is at least 10 negative ones, professing a dystopian future. The problem is not the AI, its us .While we might live in a dystopian future it will be of our doing.

    Ziga Kuhar

    Written by

    entrepreneur, marketing automation enthusiast, with special interest in AI