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.
Sources:
