Like every revolution before, AI will kill jobs in the short term!

OPINION CONTRIBUTORS: Vidya Munde-Müller and Thomas Kicker

In Silicon Valley, there is hardly any other trend causing so much buzz as AI and rightfully so, it is after all the fourth Industrial revolution! In this Op-Ed, we want to highlight some facts, influential quotes and our humble opinion, that like in any prior revolution, there will be short term losses but long-term gains for the society.

Artificial Intelligence - A short introduction:

Andrew Ng (co-inventor of Google Brain) from Stanford University calls AI the ‘New Electricity’. But AI is not new. It can be dated back 60+ years ago starting with the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence in 1956. Although hyped at the beginning, the AI cycle was followed by some long periods of disillusionment summarized as a period ‘AI winter’. Due to many breakthroughs in the compute power in the 21st century, including the ability to efficiently store, transfer and compute data or in short ‘Big Data’, AI is now trendy again and changing our world.

According to the World Economic Forum, we are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution and AI is driving it by automating and augmenting the human capabilities. After the first three waves with the steam engine, mass production and Internet, in the next 10 years we will shift to a world that is ‘AI First’ per Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google. AI evolution fits three waves, beginning with the classical approach based on rules (handcrafted knowledge), second wave with statistical approach introducing deep learning where millions of images of cats as input helped the algorithm deduce which image is a cat or not. The third wave is a mixture between rules based and statistical approach (contextual adaptation) where it can explain why it identified an image in a photo as a cat; ‘because the object in the image has two ears, fur, whiskers and is the size of a typical house cat.’

Fields of AI Deployment:

It is far easier to talk about fields where AI will be applied than talk about fields where it won’t be. Maybe one thinks about human creativity as the un-crossable boundary or maybe it is a hairdresser job that Andrew Ng jokes about. It is tough to find an innovation field without AI involved. The first wave (rules-based approach) brought us chess playing algorithms, customer self-service platforms and automated logistics scheduling programs and is still finding applications in Cyber security. The second (statistical) wave is performing very well and has found diverse applications like the Facebook feed, Amazon Alexa, Netflix movie recommendations, self-driving cars, Roomba vacuum, finance and portfolio management, predictive maintenance, navigation, healthcare diagnosis and so forth to quote Bootstrap Labs. The third wave with the mixed approach will usher in systems which can construct explanatory models for real world phenomena and can be trained using little data. Yoshua Bengio, a deep learning pioneer from the university of Montreal, anticipates that we’ll see systems that can understand and do a good job at generating natural language within the next five years. Our interaction with computers will become more conversational in nature as computers comprehend and contextualize information, picking on gestures and emotions. This will enable new smart personal assistants or personalized health care in the relatively short-term future. The continued development of Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities will also help supply AI systems with more context, as sensors send contextual data about people and objects to AI systems, helping the third wave of AI.

Societal Impact:

The industry is already preparing on AI as a game changer technology. A forecast from Mckinsey & Company shows a saving of $16 trillion in wages due to automation of existing work activities and this along with opinions by Tech CEOs like Elon Musk and Bill Gates is largely driving the public perception of AI as a threat to humanity. Mainly it revolves around the fear of singularity, the implications on moral standards and the more current fear of loss of jobs. The latest spat between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg on the human impact of AI shows how this issue divides the tech sector. Even an optimistic opinion from Zuckerberg does little to stop the dystopian view of AI from taking effect. The fear of ‘singularity’ i.e. AI-powered ninja-warrior robots surpassing humans may be unrealistic according to the experts like Andrew Ng, who tell us that we have ethics issue rather than existential threat, which could be hundreds of years away. He quotes, “Job displacement is so huge I'm tempted to not talk about anything other than that.” According to Jeff Bezos, “It’s hard to overstate, how big of an impact AI is going to have on society over the next 20 years.” Mostly it will impact lower-skilled people in different sectors such as fast-food, retail, transportation, manufacturing and administration, with those possessing only basic level qualifications facing a 46 per cent risk of losing their jobs. Even in sectors, where AI will save lives, healthcare, it will also kill jobs. There are already examples of job displacement in healthcare with IBM's Watson platform changing the way doctors diagnose disease. For instance, IBM Watson’s recommendations are matching those from oncologists in 99 percent cases and even offers options that doctors missed in 30 percent of them! Harvard Business Review suggests that once AI-based systems surpass human performance at a given task, they are much likelier to spread quickly.

But it is not all job loss. In a global study funded by Accenture PLC on more than 1000 companies using AI, new job categories such as 'trainers, explainers and sustainers' were identified. These roles are not replacing old ones. They are novel, requiring skills and training that have no precedents. Example of the trainer category are teachers, who could take their training and become computational linguists - people whose job it is to help AI understand language and mimic human behaviors. The second category of explainers will bridge the gap between technologists and business leaders and help make the work of machines transparent. Sustainers will help ensure that AI systems are operating as designed. For example, individuals in role of ethics compliance managers will act as a kind of watchdog for upholding norms of human values and morals — intervening if, for example, an AI system for credit approval was discriminating against people in certain professions or specific geographic areas. More such roles will come to light with the progress of AI. But the big question is whether the delta between job creation and job destruction is positive. As Google’s top scientist Peter Norvig points to this uncertainty, ‘it's easy to see jobs disappearing ... [but] it's hard to see the new jobs that will be invented because they don't exist yet.’

Conclusion: 

AI technology is immensely powerful and is causing changes in our everyday life. Whilst it is not a new technology, recent improvements in compute capabilities boosted its power exponentially. As with any new technology, it will create winners and losers, whereby especially low-skilled job displacement is a major concern. An immediate revolution of education systems and individual willingness and ability to learn new skills will be key as well as the role of Government in providing training efforts and regulation to help protect the workers it could replace. Some Tech CEOs are backing the concept of ‘Universal Basic Income’ to counter the negative effects of mass unemployment. In the long-term, the labor market will regulate itself and AI will be everywhere, doing everything. This can take time to reach the full effect but we should expect measurable impact on the labor market in the next 3-5 years.

Just like electricity transformed industries like manufacturing, communication, transportation, AI will transform almost all industries and will thus open new worlds for humans to explore. It is up to us to endeavor in that direction with a societal vision that is fair to us all.

Thomas Kicker is SVP of Group Business Development and Partnering at Deutsche Telekom.

Vidya Munde-Müller is a Product Manager of a Mobile App and an AI-enthusiast at Deutsche Telekom