Artificial Intelligence is the New Black. Since its rise to stardom, AI has had an unquestionably positive effect on our lives. Think of Siri, your friendly personal assistant embedded in your iPhone. What about Netflix that uses AI algorithms to recommend our next movie? And consider our good old drones that use AI to guide them on how and where to fly.
But let’s sit down and ponder upon the darker side of artificial intelligence: Its potential to replace all our jobs.
The world’s population is still growing and is likely to hit 9.8 billion by 2050. This is coupled with disappointing economic growth with global unemployment hitting a record 200 million in 2017.
Do you happen to be among the few fortunate individuals who still have a decent-paying job? Because somewhere out there, a certain type of beast in the form of a machine is currently being worked on; this beast will be capable of deputizing you from your current profession in the near future.
Artificial Intelligence, or otherwise known as AI, is a computer system capable of mimicking the cognitive functions of a human being such as speech recognition, and the ability to interpret visual information, learn, solve problems and make decisions.
Job displacement is probably one of the biggest harms AI will cause to the human race. The amount of work that can be done with AI will supersede any manual labor performed by us.
According to Andrew Ng, former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, founder of the Google Brain project, and former chief scientist at Baidu, if executives had a better understanding of what AI is all about and what it’s really capable of, millions of people would have been jobless already.
In the Harvard Business Review article, Andrew also mentioned that many executives have approached him to inquire what AI can do because they were eager to learn how it could potentially destroy their current business model and how they would be able to leverage what it had to offer to reinvent their organizations.
By the same token, Elon Musk, who happens to be one of the most prominent personalities in the tech world warned about the impending doom which AI will likely cause the human race. He stressed in his interview on AeroAstro that we should be careful with artificial intelligence because it’s like “summoning a demon” that would be difficult to control.
The thought that AI can do your work far better than you can should give you enough reasons to be very concerned.
The impact of AI is already being felt from manufacturing in China to insurance and investment in Japan and the US. And as AI technologies further develop and its array of capabilities grow, more and more people whose jobs revolve around those skills will be replaced.
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