Artificial intelligence is all over today. However, opinions whether AI will take over our jobs and in what extent it will are divided among experts. According to Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, the impact that AI will have is “hard to overstate” (Kucheriavy, 2018). Other experts argue that “Jobs requiring high emotional engagement in the customization and delivery of services to other human beings will be the most safe.” (Houser, 2018).
A recent report by a Belgian news program, Pano, investigated the matter. In certain sectors, the “boring, routine, repetitive, and physically arduous jobs” are already being taken over by AI (Houser, 2018). For example, a Belgian agricultural company is using AI to predict the ripeness of fruits, and more specifically, strawberries. It works as follows: a robot drives through the plant rows, counts the strawberries based on ripeness, and this information is used to predict the harvest. In that way, the company can better plan and measure the workforce needed for the upcoming picking season.
However, not only the easy and boring jobs are taken over by AI. Knowledge-intensive sectors like healthcare and journalism are increasingly starting to apply AI in their daily tasks. In one of the biggest hospitals in Belgium, the UZ Antwerp, AI is already used by doctors to examine scans and find out how illnesses like Multiple Sclerose (MS) evolve over time. In that way, doctors can find out if the medication given to patients has any effect, and possibly extent patients’ life expectancy. What for humans takes a few hours to find out, AI can do in a few seconds. The same is happening regarding journalism. A company in Stuttgart, Germany, developed a software which can write texts on its own. The only input humans need to give is data, tell the software what it should do, how it should interpret it and what rules count. The software is able to write up to 35.000.000 texts per month, ranging from small news articles to product descriptions for websites and stores.
Until recently, experts thought that music was only something humans could compose as it is something you need a certain level of emotion and creativity for. The Pano report proved those experts wrong. They conducted an experiment whereby a famous Belgian pianist played a known music piece, followed by hours of his own improvisations on that piece. Based on that, they let the software compose its own music, which it did successfully.
The question that remains is, will AI take over our jobs? Now that AI is evolving to emotionally and creative-intensive sectors, like the music-industry, the answer to that question stays something we can only find out about in the near future, although I think we should definitely be prepared for it.
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Hi Sophie,
Thank you for the interesting read! I agree with you that it is extremely important to consider the point of AI taking over jobs. Personally, I think that the question shouldn’t be if AI will take over jobs, but when AI will start taking over our jobs. However, I do think that this will mainly be the jobs that are fit for standardization, such as the example that you mentioned about ripeness of the strawberries. I think there will a lot of “easy” jobs that will be replaced by machines and robots, but there will also be an increase in technology related jobs that we do not even know of right now. So in the end it will balance out a bit, but I do see your point that we should really think about the future and plan ahead for this change. P.S. I actually found an example of a similar process a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBddJjYNp0g. Very interesting to see how AI can already do this and eliminate human jobs!
Hi Sophie, really interesting topic. I wonder how will AI shape the future of our world daily and had several discussions about what sectors are relatively safe from AI overtaking it. I would say one of the safest sectors is human care and jobs where emotional intelligence and psychological cues are important. Such as daycare, care of the elderly, kindergarten teachers. I think our world will experience a shift where knowledge intensive professions are becoming less valued economically and emotionally intensive professions will be valued the highest. It is definitely and interesting discussion and there are a lot of improvements in Artificial Emotional Intelligence and there is a chance AI can overtake us humans in that too. However, ultimately human connections and interactions are hard to replace.
Hi Sophie,
Interesting article! Personally, I think that AI will eventually take over some of our jobs in the future, mainly freeing humans from mundane tasks that can be automated. However, I have also wondered whether AI can take over tasks that require human emotion. For instance, we could combine AI with emotional intelligence to improve customer service. I think a well-trained machine will always outperform human. So, this would allow us to detect and respond more effectively to emotional responses, which improves customer experience.
On the other hand, I am wary of the risks. For example, emotional intelligence allows AI to understand and play into human emotion. Proper protective legislation is needed to protect our privacy and prevent it to be used with maleficent intent. All in all, I wonder what the future hold for us on emotional intelligence.
Hi Sophie, interesting post! I agree with you that it is difficult to predict the exact implications AI will have on our jobs. However, the examples you mentioned show that even areas experts first expected to keep relying on human capabilities are now also being affected by AI. It shows what AI is capable of and I think it should make us start thinking about the implications the technology will have on our jobs and lives. I think this technological revolution is essentially different from earlier technological revolutions like for example the one of the internal combustion engine. Where earlier technological revolutions aimed for simply making industries more efficient, AI aims for the replacement of the human mind. I think it is reasonable to assume that AI will have major implications for many jobs currently executed by humans and could lead to a decrease in the number of jobs available. Once AI starts taking over jobs, it could create a problem for our society as a whole. People need their jobs for emotional wellbeing. A job gives a person a purpose and a sense of contribution. Taking that away could have a negative effect on our emotional wellbeing. I think it would be good to pay more attention to this aspect of the technology in order to be prepared for the changes that are coming.
Excellent blog post! The question of AI (or technology in general) and job destruction is highly relevant and has large societal implications. From my perspective, we can safely assume that AI will replace some jobs and drastically change the nature of some others. Although, during technological revolutions so far many new jobs were created, I’m worried about the frictional effects. Are we really going to require sales clerks to retrain for the position of “virtual world designer”?
Thanks for this very interesting article! I agree that AI is able to replace certain jobs and is improving quickly. However, what we see currently as well is that AI is primarily used in collecting and analyzing data, mainly to support humans in their decision making (as the example with the strawberries). The decisions AI driven software makes itself are in most conventional uses rather simple, for instance in sorting etc. Thus, at the current level of AI development there still needs to be human input at various points. Also we have to keep in mind that development in certain industries and technological adaptation in most SME’s is rather slow. Thus, I strongly believe that certain jobs even though they could be replaced by AI today already will still exist in the medium to long term.
Thank you for your interesting post! Nice read.
This has been a hot topic indeed, but I believe that the concept fear of the unknown really fuels it.
As you mentioned, people don’t know how AI will change the labor market, but it definitely will have a major impact. So people being scared of AI is indeed justifiable. However,I also believe that two things are quite often overlooked when it comes to this concept.
Firstly, I think that people overlook that most probably people will be working along side these technologies in order to make their work more efficient and effective. Just like the guest lecturer mentioned, that people worked better with certain computer systems (that they tested with) compared to just the computer or employee alone. Plus, it frees up more time for the employee to work on other stuff, which means that in the same amount of time the company is able to do more.
Second, people often only see the current positions in the market and see that AI is able to do those jobs faster and with more precision for a lower cost (compared to a waged employee). However, what we don’t know yet, is which new jobs and opportunities will arise once they are implemented. Which thus means new opportunities for employees (potentially those employees whose job got taken by the robots).
Thank you for your post Sophie! This is by far one of the hottest topics in shaping our lifestyle for the future; will AI take over human jobs? I believe the more appropriate discussion is whether we can shape AI to help us create more efficient processes and environment. It is true we have achieved automation in several industries which would be beyond imagination few years ago. Automobile, e-commerce, healthcare, airlines, education and the list goes on. In order for machines to learn and showcase thoughts similar to humans, it needs inputs from industry experts. This is where we have to understand AI is there to help and not take over humans. Yes, there will be a lot of functions where machines will or are performing better than humans and it is would be a wise move to automate such jobs. However, there is an increasing need of individuals who understand machines, technology and the core function of any given job. These are not all data scientist or computer programmers.
With developing technology we adapt ourselves as seen throughout history, be it industrial revolution, age of computers or the internet boom. Jobs were displaced but the net employment only increased along with increased consumption and production.
Thank you for your post, Sophie! I do think that some AI-solutions are going to replace a number of tasks that human workers are currently doing.What we can expect, is that these solutions will shift shift the job distributions across different industries and sectors. Also, we will need to find realistic ways in which the portion of the workforce that is more at risk from the advent of AI can be retrained to become a valuable asset to the company when their work is aided by such innovations.