AI: Job Market Boom or Gloom?
The stealthy rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is set to revolutionise our world and most of all our workplace. The foundation of modern economies depends on paid employment giving consumers spending power. The fundamental question therefore is how will AI effect the job market and impact the global economy?
Me: Hey Siri, Remind me to post my article at 6:00pm tonight
Siri: OK, when would you like to be reminded?
Me: 6:00 PM
Siri: OK, tell me what you wanted to be reminded about?
Me: To post my article
Siri: Sorry, I didn’t quite get that, could you try again?
For many of us, this cumbersome exchange with voice assistants hardly appears threatening to our livelihoods. To no surprise, it is difficult to see how AI will completely transform the job market as we know it. However, according to a pwc report, AI is predicted to displace over 800 million jobs across the world and boost the global economy by $14.2 trillion (12.5% of GDP) by 2030.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
We often hear scaremongering headlines claiming “AI will make you redundant” or “AI to take over the world”. AI is already present in all forms of industry: Education, Medicine, Banking, Insurance and Manufacturing. However, at it’s core, AI is a machine with the ability to learn and with that, comes the power to reason and to self-correct. It simulates human intelligence using problem solving algorithms and formulae. In short it starts to think and find solutions faster and more accurately than the human brain. Inevitably, AI faces heavy scrutiny over it’s impact on the job market and the economy.
How AI is Set to Change The Workplace
The use of AI alongside businesses has grown over 270% in the past four years in nearly all areas of enterprise. One of the key reasons behind this is AI’s huge potential to boost the level of productivity. The main driver is machine automation which allows faster high quality production lines with the ability to efficiently and immediately update managers with key processing data.
Critics of AI, often argue that its implementation will lead to mass unemployment. In practise, this hasn’t happened yet. Since 2013, the number of jobs using AI has increased by 450%, but so far we have not seen a fall in the levels of general employment as a result. It has though changed the types of jobs being done.
Automation will displace 75 million jobs but generate 133 million new ones worldwide by 2022.
©World Economic Forum
This brings us to one of the most critical questions: which sectors will see increased employment? In other words how do you future proof your career.
Certainly nearly all job sectors are at risk of losing hundreds of millions of jobs to AI within the next few decades. A popular example being Autonomous transport often cited as having the potential to dispense with millions of paid drivers worldwide.
The ray of hope for future job opportunity lies in the yet unknown potential for AI to create employment. In the same way the dawn of the internet threatened mass unemployment, it has in fact gone on to generate employment in commerce, entertainment and all areas of human endeavour.
You only have to look at the development of the smartphone to see how many new jobs have been created. Not only in the production lines of smartphone makers, but the almost countless new roles based around research, development of both hardware and applications. Let alone the springboard smartphones have given to the massive employers in e-commerce and social media.
It is highly likely AI will have the same explosive effect when it comes to job creation. Many existing sectors will experience a high increase in demand. PwC’s recent report revealed that 200,000 extra jobs will be created in education alone.
There will no doubt be a period of adjustment when AI will axe jobs. Many of those losses may well be among white collar jobs, such as those in banking, insurance and engineering. Forecasts from Oxford University claim that 35% of UK jobs will be at’ high risk’ of being automated by AI over the following 20 years. However the World Economic forum and McKinsey Global Institute both agree that AI will create more jobs than it will destroy in the coming decades. Unlike the spread of robots which mainly replaced low skilled manual jobs, AI threatens higher paid professional workers who are actually more susceptible to the growth of AI.
Our analysis shows that workers with graduate or professional degrees will be almost four times as exposed to AI as workers with just a high school degree. Holders of bachelor’s degrees will be the most exposed by education level, more than five times as exposed to AI than workers with just a high school degree.
© Brookings
Conclusion
The industrial revolution sparked the emergence of the luddites in the 19th century and ever since critics have resisted and feared the progress of technology. The speed of change AI heralds will be revolutionary for the world economy, but may well present an opportunity beyond our present ability to imagine.
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Adam Portch
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