Will AI Take My Job? Bosses Shouldn’t Only Consider Bottom Line, Says Expert

tech.hindustantimes.com:

 The meteoric rise of AI has catapulted the world into uncharted territory. That's good news for futurists like Amy Webb, who studies emerging technologies and uses quantitative and qualitative modeling to forecast how they'll impact business and society.

As founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute, Webb has been grappling with AI and all its concomitant fears, from end-of-humanity doomsday scenarios to market flash crashes and jobs destruction.

We caught up with Webb earlier this week at the SXSW conference in Sydney. (Questions and responses have been edited and condensed.)

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AI can greatly improve productivity for cognitive jobs where there's a lot of reading, sorting and tagging, which you often find at professional services firms, law firms and investment banks. It requires less people hours to do those tasks, and you can ask an AI system to find patterns that you may have missed. That said, it's still humans using the tech. There are plenty of cases where there is ample technology around us and people are somehow less productive. Humans are sort of biologically wired to expend as little energy as possible — it's literally within our cellular structure — so I am curious as to whether this indulges our innate sense of laziness going forward and what that might mean.

People ask, “is AI taking my job? Or taking a bunch of jobs?” But nobody's asking what would it take for that to be true. We don't have enough plumbers anywhere, right? In medicine, we've come a long way. You can use AI systems with computer vision to spot anomalies. But for AI to truly replace a knowledge worker requires the workers themselves to do the training to train these AI systems.

For instance, medical