Eighty-five million jobs are expected to be replaced by artificial intelligence (AI) across 15 industries and 26 economies by 2025, according to a 2020 publication from the World Economic Forum.
The first AI ever created was made in December of 1955 by Herbert Simon and Allen Newell, who developed the Logic Theorist, which proved dozens of complex theorems using symbolic logic. Ever since then, this technology has evolved at a rapid rate, transforming industries and our future. From finance to healthcare, AI doesn’t just adjust how we work but also changes the types of jobs available to the workforce. With it constantly getting better and better, one question arises in everyone’s mind: Will there even be jobs for humans in the future, or will AI fully take over?
“People have been trying to get machines to do our work for us for years. It used to be that machines would replace the dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs, but now the white-collar jobs are under threat too. So those industries are starting to get worried,” said Kate Devlin, a computer scientist and professor specializing in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction at King’s College London.
How AI is affecting different industries
When used properly, AI has multiple benefits. For instance, in manufacturing, AI has revolutionized the industry, taking over many human jobs through automation. According to MIT Sloan, AI in manufacturing can maintain continuous operations, help in maintenance and defect detection, and eliminate repetitive tasks for humans. Robots are well designed to handle repetitive tasks such as assembling car parts or packaging products with more efficiency and accuracy than people could, which makes these factories far more productive as a whole.
According to the National Library of Medicine, in healthcare, AI is great for diagnosis, increasing the number of patients treated, and completing administrative activities. There is also AI that can analyze medical scans, thus enabling doctors to diagnose and treat patients more efficiently and accurately. However, AI is not likely to make decisions regarding a patient, and doctors are still the ones in charge.
“AI is a great tool to help with diagnosis and treatment planning, but it cannot replace the intuition, empathy, and critical thinking a doctor brings to patient care. AI should be used as an aid, not a substitute for human judgment,” said cardiologist and scientist Eric Topol in his book Deep Medicine.
Meanwhile, in the financial sector, according to Google, AI helps drive insights for data analytics, real-time calculations, customer servicing, intelligent data retrieval, and many more jobs. Nevertheless, with the simplification of such tasks, there is an increasing demand for financial analysts who can decipher statistics and make strategic decisions from AI-interpreted data. Although AI can help get and analyze the data, final decisions on what to do with this information is up to human intuition and AI cannot make those types of decisions.
“While algorithms can identify patterns, they may overlook unique cases that rely on human judgment to account for nuanced and context-specific decisions. Critical decisions often require human intuition,” said Solon Barocas, a Principal Researcher in the New York City Microsoft Research Lab and a faculty member in informational science at Cornell University.
The skills of the future
Although AI has the potential to take over lots of jobs, the development of AI itself requires human participation. According to the University of Michigan Journal of Economics, although 85 million jobs are estimated to be replaced by AI, 97 million jobs will be created for humans.
AI excels at doing repetitive tasks that don’t require much thinking. Forbes foresees that jobs such as administrative tasks, manufacturing and assembly lines, customer service, graphic design, and analytical roles are expected to be taken over by AI the fastest.
On the other hand, AI is not so good at soft skills; creativity, emotional intelligence, and problem-solving abilities are becoming increasingly important as AI does not yet have the capacity to compete with humans on these topics. Additionally, programming and computer science are industries that AI has created many more jobs for. According to the U.S. Career Institute, physical jobs that require human-to-human contact, such as healthcare providers, emergency responders, and jobs requiring hands-on initiatives are at very low risk of being affected by AI.
Ethical considerations and challenges
Despite the multiple benefits that AI introduces, it also brings light to ethical concerns that must be addressed. Job displacement is one of the most common issues in jobs such as manufacturing and retail, where AI automation can excel the most in repetitive tasks. According to an MIT and Boston University paper, by 2025, it is estimated that 2 million workers in the manufacturing industry will lose their jobs to AI. This begs the question of whether replacing all these people is ethically moral.
“Where emotional intelligence is required – say, for example, a guidance counselor or a therapist – there are some benefits, such as people feeling more able to disclose confidential information to a computer than another human. But there are big issues around privacy: who is developing the software, and what is that company doing with your private conversations?” Devlin said.
Transparency is also a vital issue. AI systems need to be clear about how they are developed and how their programs are made. We must learn to work against the biases of AI and understand that they are inevitable.
“I think workplaces should be open about their use of AI both to their workers and customers. Automation bias means that people often consider a computer to be fairer or more objective than a human, but we know from extensive studies that that’s not true at all. Machine learning models inherit human biases, and they amplify and perpetuate them. People should know when machines are making decisions,” Devlin said.
Future opportunities
One thing certainly stands out, though: AI will not take over the world. Even with its growth, AI opens up new opportunities for those who are willing to adapt and learn the skills necessary to work alongside it.
The only learning, if anything, that comes from the uprising of AI is the fact that it’s all about adapting to shifts toward collaboration between humans and AI rather than just replacing human workers. When simple tasks such as customer service are concerned, the AI chatbots can handle basic questions while allowing human agents to deal with situations that require more depth and complexity. It is all about finding the right balance between using AI to benefit humans, without completely taking them over.
“The threat to us from AI is unlikely to be superintelligence. There are already evidenced threats from AI like environmental threats, hidden and exploitative labor harms, power imbalances on a global level, and systems that perpetuate human bias. Tech companies like to suggest that the AI-dominant future is inevitable, but it doesn’t have to be. We can and should steer development ethically and responsibly,” Devlin said.
