AI and Job Destruction: Is AI Going to Steal Your Job?
Artificial intelligence (AI), has been garnering a lot of attention of late, especially as it racks up impressive victories over humans in games. But when humans see AI help design one of the world’s tallest skyscrapers, or beat the world champion in Go, they can’t help but wonder, “How long will it be before a computer can outperform me at my job?” In this three-part blog post series, we will investigate the many facets of the AI and job destruction issue, offering insight into the matter, and in some cases even advice from leaders in this cutting edge field.
The question on everyone’s mind
Who will be affected by the AI revolution? At least to some degree, the answer seems to be everyone. The ripple effects of AI will certainly reach out to touch the lives of just about everybody. What we really want to know is who will be directly affected, not merely incidentally or indirectly impacted. To explore this, let’s begin with the question that is most pressing on people’s minds, namely, whose jobs will be threatened by AI.
Whose jobs are in danger?
Stanford professor and former AI scientist of Google’s parent company Alphabet, Andrew Ng, provides the following rule of thumb: “almost anything a typical human can do with less than one second of mental thought, we can probably now or in the near future automate using AI.” Hopefully this sounds like good news to many. After all, the most unpleasant parts of work often involve the unyielding flow of tasks like that running across your desk. You want to be working on a creative initiative for your job, but instead you have to stop and juggle invites to schedule a meeting, or send a dozen emails with simple three-word answers, or tediously copy and paste information across two lists. Wouldn’t it be great if AI could take care of all of those tasks for you, leaving you free to engage more fully with the cognitively interesting parts of your job?
That’s the reason that we developed Talla, an artificially intelligent bot specifically designed to automate away a number of the tedious tasks that typically bog down internal service teams like IT and HR. Talla integrates with your chat platform to intelligently answer the repetitive questions you so frequently get, such as “How do I change my password,” and “Where can I see how much vacation I have left?” You train Talla, building up its knowledge base so it can answer these questions for you, even when the questions are asked in a number of different ways. And when company information changes — as it’s wont to do — Talla helps let you know that its answers are out of date. The service provided by Talla improves employee work experience by cutting out tedium, thereby allowing the employees to focus on their critical job tasks. This elevated employee efficiency translates into increased productivity for the business, resulting in a win-win for both employee and employer.
But some are worried about the careers that are composed almost entirely of boring and tedious tasks, tasks that can be handled with only one second of mental thought? These jobs will not necessarily be destroyed, because they may also involve a uniquely human component to them as well. But as Andrew Ng points out, it is important to see that even if AI does place those jobs on the chopping block a ways down the road, this is not necessarily a baleful outcome. It just means that we will all “learn to be lifelong learners,” and this is a valuable attribute and skill for everyone in the workforce to possess and foster.
Coming up next
In the next post, we’ll explore the worries some have expressed over job destruction disproportionately affecting the economically disadvantaged. While there is certainly reason to be attentive to this issue, it is also important to note that AI is well positioned to champion the economically disadvantaged, providing cutting edge assistance to historically underserved populations.
