The effect of artificial intelligence on the nature of work has been completely disruptive till now. The disruptive nature of this technology is still a matter of debate. While many have seen this disruption in a negative light, there are others who have associated a lot of positivity with the AI phenomenon. The negativity is mainly due to the reason that robots are eating up the jobs that were originally intended for humans. But this can be looked at from another perspective as well. According to a survey by Sapio Research, the number of jobs that have been lost to artificial intelligence form only ten percent of the jobs that are slated to be created by this technology in the next ten years. Even more interesting are the results from another survey of Gartner.
This survey predicted that there is just no looking back when it comes to AI as there would be an exponential rise in the number of jobs related to AI in the next decade. This is the time to bring into account the observations of the world economic forum in this regard. This platform reported in its subsequent summits that it was difficult to envisage the future of jobs in absence of artificial intelligence. The forum also promoted the idea of Superhuman Intelligence in its summits and briefed about the collective nature of work by man and the machine in the times to come.
Reimagining work
In the beginning of the 21st century, we saw a drastic reduction in the number of manual jobs and an upsurge in the number of digitized jobs. One of the most popular books which holistically talks about the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs in the present century is Human and Machine: Reimagining work in the age of AI. The book mentions two jobs that would be in very high demand in near future. These two jobs would be that of trainers and explainers. The role of trainers would be to train a large number of people in handling complex AI courses.
The role of explainers would be primarily limited to imparting an artificial intelligence course. The book also mentions chatbots that would change the nature of communication channels between administration and customers. To speak about chatbots more openly, there is also a limiting factor associated with their usage. This limiting factor is that of a linguistic barrier which can make the comprehension of logical statements difficult between two parties out of which one is a human.
The AI empowerment
The empowerment caused by artificial intelligence would be significant in nature because it would aid both employees and the employers. In no way, artificial intelligence would act as a phenomenon which completely replaces human labour. It would rather act as a conducive mechanism to help in the creation of more and more jobs. There are two important dimensions to the new jobs that would be created. The first would be the large range of sectors including logistics, retail, infrastructure, finance, management, manufacturing, healthcare services, educational services etc. The second would be the quality of jobs that would be much better than the present ones.
If we try to exemplify the above discussion, we would talk about the business process outsourcing sector. In this sector, the employees would get instant feedback and information about the needs of the customer which would bring efficiency to the entire industry. In another example, we speak about the healthcare system. It is this system where the nature of jobs would witness a great transformation. With the help of deep learning techniques and convolution neural networks, it would be possible to take the treatment of diseases to a new level altogether.
Conclusion: Glimpses of change in future
It is popularly said that the next decade belongs to AI. This means that we need to set ourselves up for this change. The first instance of this change would be the time when the operating mechanisms of various systems start to change. This would not only mean that our training needs would change but would also mean that our exposure to newer systems and models be expedited. That said, there might be a little drop in the diversity of work from the present times. But that doesn’t mean that the level of creativity associated with new jobs would drop. We may well witness the creation of such interactive systems which would take the level of creativity to a new high in the future.
