Few topics are more discussed nowadays than the impact of AI on future jobs, employment and skills. Most researchers and published articles are raising the fear of AI by claiming that it will soon bring upon a momentous revolution in most (if not all) industries. To give one example, Carl B. Frey and Michael A. Osborne (2013) estimate that 47% of US jobs are at high risk to be automated, most likely in the next 20 years. Moreover, Yuval N. Harari points out, in his book ‘Homo deus’, that it will be difficult to find tasks that humans can perform better than algorithms when a computer program called EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) is already able to create a better music composition than Bach, when algorithms are already appointed board seats as in the Hong Kong venture-capital firm ‘Deep Knowledge Ventures’ and when algorithms can predict the likelihood of getting a certain disease more accurately than humans. Additionally, the fear of losing a job to AI is enhanced when people read newspaper headlines like ‘Zalando to cut 250 staff and replace them with algorithms’.

Considering this media representation, I personally can understand that people are hesitant to embrace the upcoming technological revolution with excitement and openness towards it. That is why I would like to point out that a similar revolution in jobs, employment and skills did already happen approximately 200 years ago. Back then, the industrial revolution brought along so many technological advances increasing the productivity of agriculture to such a degree that most farm workers became obsolete and had to change into industrial or service jobs. Of course, it can be doubted whether the upcoming advances and changes can be compared to the revolution back then, but I am strongly convinced that new job fields will arise for everyone and that through AI we might even be able to focus more time on task we are passionate about. Cumbersome tasks that involved a lot of repetition can, will be and are already taken over by algorithms thereby offering us the possibility to dig deeper into unique challenges.

Nevertheless, I believe that we will also need to change with the revolution ahead of us. Knowledge was used to double every century until the 1900’s according to Richard B. Fuller (1981). Nowadays it is doubling in less than 11 hours according to IBM (2006). Of course, this implies that what we learnt in high school and university or what we will learn in our first couple of working years will most likely not be up to date or not relevant at all after a couple of years. Therefore, we need to keepup our efforts and learn continuously. But good news – learning was never as easy before! Today, already children with the age of 3 can start learning programming with a toy called ‘Cubetto’ and for those of us who are already above that age there are massive open online courses, billions of videos, articles and blogs about any topic one can think of available on various online platforms. So let’s do not get intimidated by AI or other future technologies but embrace them with curiosity and endow ourselves with the needed skills to take full advantage of them.

Sources:

Frey, C. B., & Osborne, M. A. (2013). The future of employment how susceptible are jobs to computerisation? Oxford, Oxford Martin School, Univ. of Oxford.

Fuller, R. B. (1981). Critical path. New York, St. Martin’s Press.

Harari, Y.N. (2016). Homo deus: a brief history of tomorrow.

IBM Global Technology Services. (2016). The toxic terabyte.