Those repetitive jobs where we do the same thing over and over, will be gone.
Let’s be clear about AI. It is artificial, it is not intelligent.
AI is very good at some things we humans are bad at, but it is no good at what made we humans so successful. The imagination, and emotion, the capacity to empathise, and understand complexity we are born with is not artificial, and cannot be replicated by machines, at least not in the foreseeable future.
Machines can do things faster and more reliably than us, and they do not go on smoko, no holidays, hangovers or emotional attachments to fellow workers.
Machines are fast and reliable, and fast and reliable is a huge benefit.
Machines are also very accurate, tell them what to do, they do it. Again, something we humans are not so good at, we tend to vary things around, sometimes just to relieve the boredom.
Machines do the routine, mind numbing tasks that we put aside, or do poorly. They do not have a mind, so they do not mind being bored.
Al is maths, not magic. All AI is statistics and maths that can be broken down into algorithms so they are repeatable. Machine learning is the next step on the ladder, where the algorithms learn to recognise patterns. This takes trial and error, so that eventually, the machine can isolate common characteristics in a pile of data.
This is becoming more common every day, as we see uses for pattern recognition.
Both Google and Amazon have products you can download and use that deliver astonishing accuracy in pattern recognition. An occasional client has introduced this feature on his remote cameras, so they can now distinguish between a kangaroo and a truck, triggering a response from alarm connected to the camera, so the truck, potentially an intruder sets the alarm, the kangaroo which is more likely just hungry, is ignored.
The next step is usually called ‘Deep learning,’ and we are just at the beginning of this. It is in effect layers of machine learning interacting to identify from a broader and deeper pool of input data the item of interest. We will progress down this track, and at the end, in another 50 years, perhaps machines may be able to ‘sort of’, think.
This stuff all has the potential to make us seem smarter, but we are not, we are just using machines to do what they are good at, while we still do the stuff we are good at, empathy, judgement, relationships.
Over history, technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed. While it will be painful for some, there is no reason to believe the pattern will not continue. Irrespective of the size and type of organisation you belong to, AI is knocking on the door. Open it, realise the productivity benefits, and figure out how to best use it to serve others, and make a buck along the way.
Addendum April 2023. This post was over 4 years old when ChatGPT burst onto the scene, taking the world on a wild ride. In a post in December 2022 I asked essentially the same question, ‘Will HAL’ take our jobs? https://wp.me/p5fjXq-31n and arrived at the same answer. However, the gap of only 4 years has seen the development of the technology referred to above evolve at warp speed, culminating in ChatGPT3.
