Will Artificial Intelligence Improve Our Jobs Or Wipe Them Out?

Three years ago, Amazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky excitedly brought home the bet version of Alexa and gathered his family around the brand new device.

“Who is the CFO of amazon.com?” he asked.

The answer came quickly in that VOICE?. “The CFO of Amazon is Jeff Bezos.”

Olsavsky quipped that he then put Alexa in the closet. His anecedote drew a fair share of laughs last week at INTERSECT@CMU, a conference at the brand new home of the Tepper School of Business that explored the future of business, technology and society. But the story also reminds us that when it comes to technology, you can expect plenty of glitches to occur, especially early on.

The all-day event, part of the celebratory festivities for the $201 million opening of the Tepper Quad, dove deep into the pros and cons of artificial intelligence, machine learning, Blockchain technology and autonomous vehicles. What became clear is that there are massive efficiencies that will come as these technologies evolve more fully and massive risks to go with them from concerns over privacy and confidentiality to major labor disruption and increased income inequality.

Amazon’s Olsavsky is an unapologetic optimist. “Digital assistants,” he says, “digital assistants are breaking your relationship with the keyboard. Voice devices are giving great access to those with disabilities, including older people and those who are blind. It is incumbent on us to make them as useful as possible and that will drive adoption.”

Will digital assistants and the technologies that make them work throw humans out of work? Olsavsky doesn’t believe so. “In the 1800s,” he maintains, “as many as eight of ten people in the population was involved in agriculture. Skill sets need to adapt. The saving of mundane tasks and effort will free us up to do other things.”

He notes that when Amazon acquired a robotics company a few years ago for its warehouses, some predicted that the deal would result in the elimination of jobs. It didn’t happen, he says. Instead, jobs were improved. “It has allowed us to build bigger and denser warehouses so you cut transporation costs and the jobs have become much better. Some workers walked ten miles a day picking things. Now the technology brings things to you. We have to morph and we have to adopt. I am not so concerned about the job losses.”

Param Vir Singh, a Carnegie Mellon professor of business technologies, concedes that it’s not just blue collar workers who are worried about the impact of AI on their jobs. “A lot of business students ask if they are going to be replaced by robots,” he says. “But AI will create more jobs than takeaway jobs. Whenever new technology has come, we have always seen more jobs come after that. With AI, we are getting increasing numbers of people who want technological education. The kinds of jobs that will decrease will be routine jobs. Some of the tasks of many jobs will be automated. The definition of jobs will change”

Vir Singh even suggests that perhaps a typical work day may last just three or four hours or that a typical work week might be composed of three days instead of five because automation will take over the more mundane parts of our job. “Why shouldn’t work day be two or three hours?,” he asks. “The computer will do half your job. We are going to be in good times.” How many employers, however, would be willing to pay their employees a full week’s pay for three days of work?

Not everyone is buying that incredibly upbeat view of the future. Alexander Gray, vice president of AI Science at IBM, is less than optimistic. “We are at the cusp of full blown implementation of artificial intelligence,” he says. “It’s hard to predict what happens when you have a new technology. Somehow jobs change. It has worked out so far, but implicit in that is that there is time to reeducate people and adapt as a society. In the U.S., we are not very good at that. Governments and educational institutions are needed to help with this adaptation. Technology is accelerating more rapidly now. The last 20 years is not the same as the next 20. So you can’t go back and extrapolate from it. AI and Blockchain are moving fast. we need to accelerate education. 

Autonomous vehicles could throw hundreds of thousands of truck drivers out of work, believes former U.S. Secretary for Transportation Anthony Foxx. “It is a real issue. There is a need for retraining and repositioning of people but when I left the administration, one of the things we left as panel of 25 experts on automation and a big part of their work was the future of work and labor disruption. That panel was subsequently disbanded, but we need to have our eyes on this. It’s going to take conscious thought on our part.”

Homaira Akbari, president and CEO of consulting firm AKnowledge Partners, also agrees that this time is different, given the increased pace of change. “Every time we have had a revolution caused by technology, we have had an increase in the workforce,” she says. “I am not certain that will be the case this time. The digital divide betwen the people who have and don’t have is concern. People will get left behind.”

Asked how confident she is that personal information is and will be protected on the Internet, Akbari is unequivocal in sounding an alarm. “We are not protected, period,” she says. “We really are not. I am scared, and it is just by luck because if somebody wanted to be malicious today, they will get us— not just in the U.S. but everywhre in the world. The good news is that cybersecurity has gone up dramatically in companies. But like it or not, the reality of cybersecurity is that we will never be fully protected. If you want to be fully protected you just have to disconnect.”

Ultimately, it may well be that uncertainty will initially cause as much anxiety as whatever job loss does occur as AI-assisted automation becomes ever more prevalent. Plenty of lawyers have been put out of work by artificial intelligence, and as driverless vehicles begin hitting the road, it’s inevitable that many taxi and truck drivers will be tossed out of work. One thing you can count on is what Olsavsky encountered when he first plugged in the beta Alexa to show it off to his family: Things don’t always work as well as you want them to, especially in the beginnning.