Is AI a Job Killer or a Job Creator?

If you look at the history of technology, practically every important technology was accompanied by fears that it would eliminate jobs, but it really generated many more than it destroyed. This is undoubtedly true in the case of industrialization. Many workers were replaced by machines that could assist in manufacturing plants as the industrial revolution began.

However, history demonstrates that technology has produced more jobs than it has destroyed. As a result, we must consider whether artificial intelligence (AI) will eliminate or generate jobs in this setting. The simple answer would have been that every technological advancement has resulted in the creation of jobs, and this one would as well. But the actual reason for pause is that AI is unlike any other technology we’ve ever seen in terms of its potential to duplicate a wide range of human abilities, cognitive processes, and so on.

When you consider what AI is capable of, you’ll see that it’s a system that can effectively replace both mechanical and cognitive capabilities in humans. As a result, its potential to eliminate jobs is unrivaled.

AI As Job Killer

Will AI cause any job losses? It most certainly will!

Production workers, for instance, are now thought to be at high risk, as it is expected that robots will be able to replace them. Office jobs such as accountants and lawyers will be largely supplanted by algorithms, as is already the case in some circumstances.
For example, in the law firm Baker & Hostetler in San Francisco, a robot named Ross is already assisting human colleagues. To add pertinent papers to current cases, he analyses massive volumes of data, legal texts, notes, and other materials.

“According to Oxford Economics, robots will eliminate up to 20 million manufacturing jobs globally by 2030.”

Today courier companies are exploring the drone delivery technology automated by AI. Not only thousands of delivery personnel will lose their jobs but security guards, drivers, a part of doctors, and, farmers will be eliminated from their daily tasks.

Use Cases of AI as a Job Killer

1. Customer Service Sector

AI can now perform rote, mechanical, and manual activities. It cannot compose a narrative fiction work, but it can write about a recent sporting event or a company’s profits report. This isn’t really inventive; rather, it’s the reporting of facts in a format that’s programmed and hence easy to repeat by algorithms.

The most essential motivation for organizations to deploy AI, according to executives, is to improve customer experience.
Can you imagine a system where AI can answer 80% of people’s questions when they phone a call center? Is it really necessary to have these call centers if that happens?

The answer to your problem is that, in the not-too-distant future, such centers will be obsolete since AI will be able to communicate with clients through Interactive voice response (IVR).

2. Autonomous Vehicles

Cab aggregators are another sector where AI will have a significant impact.

Have you ever considered how cab aggregators can earn handsomely from AI?

Well, the answer to your question is to eliminate such drivers. Why?

Because drivers are merely a means to an end, which is a world without drivers.

Self-driving cars will be the future in comparison to them, putting the livelihood of cab drivers in jeopardy.

3. Law Firms

The preliminary evaluation of some legal documents can already be handled by AI, which is more efficient than a human lawyer. A competition to review legal documents was held last year by the legal AI platform LawGeex and a number of university law schools. As a result, the AI was able to complete five contracts in just 26 seconds. Lawyers took an average of 92 minutes to complete a task, while AI had a 10 times greater accuracy rate than lawyers.

I’m sure you must have heard about “Ross- The Robot”.

Lawyers can now ask ROSS a research topic, and the robot will study the law, gather information, draw conclusions, and provide particularly targeted evidence-based responses.

4. Speech Translation and Recognition

Machines will eventually take over the human responsibilities of speech recognition and translation. It will be able to easily interpret speech that can be easily comprehended, making language learning redundant.

AI As Job Creator

“According to the World Economic Forum, AI technology would generate 97 million new employment by 2025.”

Today, AI’s capabilities are drastically overestimated. There are a lot of obstacles in the way. While none of this will happen in the near future, it is possible in the next 15 to 50 years. Meanwhile, in the near future, AI will result in employment losses in a few years, but it will also result in job creation.

In certain industries, such as drug research, AI provides significant prospects for automation and digital transformation. Or Engineers, who are currently confronting a high rate of unemployment, could benefit from AI in order to manage or program machines. Artificial intelligence will someday require people to manage it in every industry. Machines will never be able to take over creative employment. Robots can only help with items that have been programmed into them. Machines will not be able to replace human creativity for the foreseeable future. A robot cannot be a human resources manager or a therapist.

Use Cases of AI as a Job Creator

1. New markets for artificial intelligence (AI)

AI will produce new technologies and markets in the same way that any other new technology does.
Artificial intelligence will, in the not-too-distant future, usher in a slew of new industries, thanks to its enormous potential for automation and digital transformation.

Given the facts and data presented above, AI can be considered both a job killer and a job creator. However, it is impossible to create an accurate comparison between the two.

Thousands of jobs will be generated versus millions of jobs lost. As a result, it will be a massive task on a net basis.

2. AI in Data Science

Today, AI’s capabilities are drastically overestimated. There are a lot of obstacles in the way. While none of this will happen in the near future, it is possible in the next 15 to 50 years. Meanwhile, we will see employment losses in the next five years as a result of AI, but we will also see job creation as a result of it. On the technical engineering front, AI will create jobs in the field of data science.

The popularity of data science stems in part from its capacity to extract information and insights from data, and in part from the fact that it is traditional analytics in which humans analyze data. However, it will mostly be used to enable occupations centered on the development of machine learning algorithms.

Jobs vis-a-vis Human Skills

• AI is limited to certain tasks, and it will undoubtedly pose a threat to regular mechanical professions and even beyond, such as contact centers.
• Will there be a need for call centers everywhere if AI can answer 80% of the questions people have when they phone a number? Then those jobs could be lost.
• Cab aggregators are another sector where AI will have a significant impact.
• On the technical engineering front, AI will create jobs in the field of data science.
• AI, together with other technologies, will generate a new market. At the moment, these don’t even exist.
• India is not a global industrial powerhouse, but it is a significant player in the services sector. AI will have an impact, but not immediately.

Cases of AI as a Job Killer

1. Rising Demand for Tech Talent

According to Stuart Frankel, CEO of Narrative Science, “technology has never been a net loser of jobs.” “Take a look at practically every technology position available in any company today. None of those positions existed twenty years ago, and the majority of them didn’t exist even ten years ago.”

In fact, rather than a complete takeover of human employment by robots, the problem right now is that there are a lot of open positions and not enough qualified individuals to fill them. The demand for tech skills is rising across the board, thanks to the rise of the data-driven industry.

For example, Cybersecurity Ventures, a cyber-economy research firm, estimated in 2020 that the cybersecurity unemployment figure was zero—and that there was a global shortage of more than one million professionals. Software development and data science, for example, aren’t faring much better and are coping with their own talent shortages. As artificial intelligence makes its way into more fields, the demand for more specialists in computer employment will continue to rise.

2. Paradigm Shift in Human-Computer Interaction

Many of the individuals who are losing their jobs to AI lack the necessary skills and knowledge to work in tech, and teaching them takes time. Fortunately, artificial intelligence can assist in the resolution of a problem that may be mainly of its own making. AI has already shown promise in several areas of education, including personalizing and enhancing the learning experience. This means that learning new skills will take less time.

Humans will be able to retrain into new industries faster than ever before, offering them the greatest flexibility in responding to work market changes. For instance, a truck driver learning to code in a matter of months

Where AI won’t be able to reduce the learning curve, it will be able to break down the complexity of activities and simplify them, allowing more people to access jobs that previously took years of study and training.

Real-Life Cases

1. Amazon stated last week that it will invest $700 million in training about 100,000 workers in the United States by 2025, allowing them to advance into higher-skilled positions. According to the New York Times, Amazon is conceding that “advancements in automated technology will handle many activities now performed by individuals” with this program.

Since 2013, when a pair of Oxford academics, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, estimated that 47 percent of American jobs are at high risk of automation by the mid-2030s, the number of jobs that AI and machines will displace has been the subject of numerous studies, surveys, op-eds, and policy papers.

2. According to the Boston Consulting Group, 67 percent of Chinese executives and 50% of US executives predict a reduction in personnel numbers over the next five years as a result of advanced robotics (global survey of more than 1,300 executives and operations managers).

3. According to ZipRecruiter, one out of every five job applicants (one out of every three for those between the ages of 18 and 22) is concerned that AI will one day replace them (survey of more than 11,000 job seekers in the US).

Conclusion

To summarise, there is a lot to learn about AI technology, including its impact on society, its capabilities, its behavior toward people after a period of time, and its credibility.

With the support of AI technology, the world’s economies are developing at a quicker rate than ever before.

‘Only the future can reveal the hidden truth of how humans, the most intellectual species on the planet, will deal with the glare of such technology, which has undeniably the capacity to subjugate humanity.’