Will Artificial Intelligence take away our jobs?

Humans have always thought of innovative ideas to solve trivial problems that made our life easier, right from the invention of electricity to computers and mobiles to aircrafts. It's not new that technology has been changing around us and there's no stopping it. But how about a machine that can think on its own and act logically without any intervention of the humans! Just like us, they can also decide the outcome based on their own thinking. We get a mixed feeling of excitement and fear both, right?

 

The evolution of Artificial Intelligence in human world

Although the concept of Artificial Intelligence have been floating around for a long time, it was in the year 1950 when Alan Turing, a British mathematician who came up with a well-defined possibility of AI's concept. He suggested that when Human beings can use the available information and reason to solve a particular problem, why can't a machine do the same? There are many sci-fi films regarding robots with Artificial Intelligence, but this field is not limited to robotics but also can be used in machines involved in our daily to daily life activities such as cars or even reports that a manager sees about his reportees progress.

In plain words, as we use our experience and formulate an algorithm to solve a problem or find out a set of possible outcomes, a machine can also do the same thing. Let us use an example to understand this.

Suppose we want to go from our home to office and don't have access to Google Maps, now we know all the routes that we can possibly take to reach the destination. But we obviously want to reach the office at the earliest; the shortest route might in normal times will get us to office at the least time, but during the office timings that route is very busy and we might get stuck in a traffic jam that will in turn delay us and make things worse. So we decide to use the next smallest route which is not that busy during the office hours as well.

In this example if we see, we have used our prior experience and calculated all the possible outcomes before taking a decision. The same thing can be applied by the machines as well to solve similar sets of problem and the training given to them to get that experience is called Machine Learning.

 

How are Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence related?

In real life when we take any decision, we always refer to our past experience and learning, hence it becomes very important that we know the consequences of a decision that is being taken. Same way, when we want to implement intelligence in the machines artificially, the machine should also have something known as Neural Network that helps the machine draw a relationship between the actions and their effects which basically mimics the operation of human brain.

Now in order to generate such data, we need to teach the machine how to react on various situations and this process is known as Machine Learning. Let us take the example of self-driving car by Google. In order to enable the cars to decide when to take a turn or before how much distance the car should apply brakes or similar set of actions, the car should have enough data or in simpler terms, it should have enough experience to draw a conclusion of what is the best solution to a problem. Now to teach them, there should be actual humans who will ride those cars so that the self-driving cars can actually store the data of the prior manual runs before the car can actually drive on its own without human intervention by inferring from the actions that were taken by the driver in different situations. The programmers of Google actually did millions of test runs to teach their cars to self drive!

 

Will Artificial Intelligence steal our jobs?

Now this question is not just coming to people's mind just because of Artificial Intelligence; before the implementation of AI started, Automation came in to the industry which was introduced to automate any repetitive process.

How Automation impacted jobs? Well from the very idea of automating the jobs that till then had to be done by human is self-explanatory that obviously it did impact a lot of jobs not limited to a particular industry. Many jobs involves processes which requires the same work to be done again and again and these industries include Information Technology, manufacturing, meat, etc. Automation not only reduces manpower but at the same time increases the rate of production or performing the task since machines work faster than human.

As Automation impacted job market, so is Artificial Intelligence expected to do. Not only in self-driving cars, but they expected to be used in various fields such as managerial jobs, robotics and other such fields. For example, we might see in the future that when you book an app-based cab a car might come which won't have a driver seated in it and can drive on its own, or when we try to order in a hotel we might see a robot taking our orders and serve food items to our tables. A lot of jobs will definitely not be required anymore once Artificial Intelligence will take those places.

 

How we can respond to the threat of job loss?

With the fear due to advancement of Artificial Intelligence, we need to also consider that companies always look for alternatives that reduce their cost of production which is why Automation was introduced. In a way it also impacts in a positive way as reducing the cost of production of an item also brings them to us at a cheaper price.

Although it can't be discarded that Artificial Intelligence will impact some jobs, but at the same time it will also create jobs in a new sector. For example companies will need employees who can build such machinery or such a gadget where Artificial Intelligence can be introduced to manage a job. Also they will need people who can maintain those machines or robots and might supervise their functions. Along with these, there will be a huge need of people who are very good at their area of expertise who can train those machines well. All these jobs will require high expertise and in turn will generate decent salaries. Hence this makes it important for us to up-skill ourselves with the growing needs of the fast changing industry or lose out in the competition.

Conclusion:

As a species, human have always evolved trying to develop new technologies and ways to make our tasks easier and complete them in a smarter way. While it is imperative that new tools will keep on being introduced to lower the cost of products and some might be the reason of job losses, it is important for everyone to understand the current demand of newer jobs that will be added as a result of those changes and prepare themselves for the changes that will be occurring.

The invention of Artificial Intelligence is a landmark to the history of mankind which is expected to change many lives in a positive way by increasing accuracy of various algorithms not limiting to weather forecasts that will alert people beforehand of natural calamities and disasters. Hence we have to accept the fact that our lives will be impacted and prepare accordingly.

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