How to save our jobs in the world of Artificial Intelligence
I have a strong belief that artificial intelligence can put more people out of work at a massive scale beyond our imagination. You can read about its causes and effects here.
There are demands for regulating AI. Elon Musk was one of the pioneers to raise this demand. His concern is that if AI is not regulated then there can be many unpredictable outcomes. Job loss is just one aspect there are many other problems that may arise.
One of the most important problems is how to make AI understand common sense and cultural aspects. There are some countries where women wear hijab. They don’t want to show their faces in public. People are sensitive to such cultural practices. If a woman in hijab comes to a western country, during immigration she’ll be escorted to a separate private place if she has to be frisked. Imagine a robot doing this work in the future and if it is not instructed to treat women in hijab differently from other people who cover their faces, it will create a lot of mess.
A classic example of machine acting in an unpredictable manner is talked about by many industry experts. Suppose AI’s primary objective is defined as “To protect and save humanity”. In that case the AI may realize that the biggest threat to human existence is global warming and climate change. Which is caused by over population and energy consumption by human beings. So it may decide to kill most of the people and leave a few so that humanity keeps on existing. Similar deductions have been shown in movies also. Terminator, Ultron and Thanos may be imaginations but experts do believe that without proper regulations they may become reality.
Problem with regulations is that it decelerates innovation. Policy makers are not experts in technology. They may put many more constraints than what are required. This can derail the phenomenon of AI and stop the good it can do towards humanity. Best solution can be that regulations are created and enforced by the industry itself. I think we are moving in that direction where a consortium of technology companies and academia will be set up to regulate and monitor AI.
Being an optimist, I would like to believe that responsible behavior from the industry will ensure that AI does more good to human beings than harm.
True intelligent Artificial Intelligence is still a distant dream. In the name of AI, we are able to automate some of the tasks that humans currently do, that too if they have large scale profitability associated with them. Self driving cars, automated customer care, voice based virtual assistants, large scale production units’ process automation and customer experience enhancing features in software applications are all examples that have large scale profitability.
We have not been able to emulate human beings’ emotional prowess. Human’s ability to react to novel situations which he/she has never experienced before. AI as of now is not able to learn what it has not experienced earlier.
Although, an exception to this is reinforcement learning. In reinforcement learning machine is made to experience an environment and is given a task. By going through many simulation runs of what is called an episode, machine is able to learn concepts applicable in that environment. Deepmind’s agent which had beaten World AlphaGo champion was trained using the concepts of reinforcement learning. But the number of simulations or the amount of experience that a machine requires to learn concepts on its own are far more than what will be required to emulate a smart human being. We don’t have that much technical expertise as of now to make it practically possible.
It will start with a walking and talking personal assistant. Next will be a robot for household work. May be a pleasure doll will follow and then all three functionalities combined in a single robot and so on. But as I said, it is far from being practically possible and acceptable by society at scale. We still have a few years before robots start taking our jobs.
Till the time AI is not able to emulate all the aspects of human beings, human beings will have to push themselves a little further to remain relevant in the society. Just like there is a minimum threshold for speaking, writing and reading skills in different languages which are required to be eligible for different jobs, the expectation of employers will increase for employees to have more skills. Understanding data and ability to use data to solve problems will be as core a skill to possess as language skills. Similarly, another all time high demand skill is ownership. People who take responsibility and fulfil it with utmost sincerity are the ones who are most cherished by the employers. Add problem solving skills, persistence, general management, time management, soft skills and long term thinking you get an entrepreneur. Employers want people with entrepreneurial mindset to hold key positions in the company. Nothing satisfies a boss more than having a subordinate who takes care of everything on his/her own. If the boss doesn’t have to worry after just mentioning a task or a problem once to an employee, that employee is indispensable.
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