Are the machines coming for you?

Airlines bleeding money. Your favourite restaurants closing after repeated lockdowns. COVID is killing jobs. But even after a vaccine saves us, people will still be talking about another threat that didn’t go away: the possibility of AI stealing all the jobs.

It is a frequently-discussed scenario and some jobs will be done by machines - a pattern repeating through history. But more jobs will be created because of that.

Here’s some context for that conversation. Companies investing in digital transformation are pouring nearly $40 billion into artificial intelligence products and services - a 57-fold increase over a decade ago. Uber and other tech giants are transparent about wanting to replace humans with an AI workforce (indeed, Uber’s business model doesn’t make sense without the switch, first with customer service reps and perhaps soon with the drivers themselves).

My idea then (as now): the proper use of AI is to help humans do their jobs, not simply replace the majority of people in the workforce. We should not be aiming for a society where people are free from work (ie. on a thinly-disguised welfare program with a nice-sounding name like The Freedom Dividend).

Deeper discussion can be found about Augmented Intelligence in this article at Forbes: Forget about Artificial Intelligence. We Need Augmented Intelligence.

People should be free to do meaningful work. The technology should assist them, not force them out.

It is encouraging to see that my preferred scenario may be the one that plays out, at least in the near term. Machines will create 58 million more jobs than they displace by 2022, World Economic Forum says. That’s great news.

For those who lived through the changing of the manufacturing centers of North America into a sad rust belt, this may come as cold comfort. However, it’s possible that many of those closed plants and lost jobs had more to do with offshoring in China than with improvements in technology. I know things look bleak now, but just look at the economy before COVID -- nearly full employment, at a time when machine learning was already in overdrive.

Providing everyone with opportunity to perform meaningful, creative work should be the objective behind every project using the term AI.


And that should be the recurring pattern.