Creativity at work may keep AI away

I gathered comments from software engineers to find out how susceptible they feel their jobs are to being handed over to artificial intelligence. Some think of themselves as irreplaceable "artists" while others accept that their "constrained" development roles could eventually be machined out. Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle? #softwareengineering #technews

Martin Fleming doesn’t think robots are coming to take your jobs. The chief economist at #IBM, Fleming says those worries aren’t backed up by the data. “It’s really nonsense,” he says. A new paper from #MIT and IBM’s Watson #AILab shows that for most of us, the automation revolution probably won’t mean physical #robots replacing human workers. Instead, it will come from algorithms. And while we won’t all lose our jobs, those jobs will change, thanks to #artificialintelligence and #machinelearning. Fleming and a team of researchers analyzed 170 million online US job listings, collected by the job #analytics firm Burning Glass Technologies, that were posted between 2010 and 2017. They found that, on average, tasks such as scheduling or credential validation, which could be performed by AI, appeared less frequently in the job listings in the more recent years. The recent listings also included more “soft skills” requirements like creativity, common sense, and judgment. Fleming says this shows that work is being resorted. #AI is taking over more easily automated tasks and workers are being asked to do things that machines can’t do.

In my personal opinion, AI is replacing lawyers' current work, not lawyers. Lawyers have the opportunity to adapt, by developing new skills and providing clients with higher-value legal services instead. For example, a business that can more readily access traditional legal services at a much lower cost (courtesy of AI-enabled efficiencies, higher availability, and reduced pricing) can potentially grow faster than before; and will eventually need (and can afford) higher-order legal services that AI cannot yet provide. So long as lawyers grow in lockstep with AI, lawyers can continue to make a unique contribution to society. We laugh with amusement at how humans lived and worked 500, 100, or even 50 years ago. Future generations will look back, with equal amusement, at how we work today. The MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab has released an article and detailed report on The Future of Work: How New Technologies Are Transforming Tasks (by Martin Fleming, IBM's Cheif Economist, and Prabhat Reddy, Subhro Das, et al.), and concludes that "All Jobs Will Change".

How important is creativity in most software engineering roles? Would you believe the rise of automation in programming will make it the most valuable skill? A recent report from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab claims that artificial intelligence is on its way to taking over a lot of job responsibilities, but roles that require "common sense, judgment, intuition, creativity and spoken language" won't be so easily handed off to robots. It's always been a safe bet to assume more and more portions of the software engineering process will continue to be automated out, but I'm starting to think there's a chance that soft skills and more general intelligence could wind up becoming more valued in the job than even code knowledge. That would make the software engineer of the future a much different job, wouldn't it? What do you think? Share your thoughts in a comment below. #softwareengineering #technews #AI

How important is creativity in most software engineering roles? Would you believe the rise of automation in programming will make it the most valuable skill? A recent report from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab claims that artificial intelligence is on its way to taking over a lot of job responsibilities, but roles that require "common sense, judgment, intuition, creativity and spoken language" won't be so easily handed off to robots. It's always been a safe bet to assume more and more portions of the software engineering process will continue to be automated out, but I'm starting to think there's a chance that soft skills and more general intelligence could wind up becoming more valued in the job than even code knowledge. That would make the software engineer of the future a much different job, wouldn't it? What do you think? Share your thoughts in a comment below. #softwareengineering #technews #AI