New Jobs in an AI Machine Learning World

You can argue about the good and bad of AI, but there is no argument that artifical intelligence is here and it is affecting jobs. Elon Musk says he fears where AI will ultimately lead, but he uses AI in his Tesla vehicles. 

I keep hearing that AI will free humans of boring drudgery jobs and give us more free time. Then, we can do human work rather than machine work. I also hear that for all the jobs lost to AI there will be at least half as many new ones created.

bookThe book Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI, examines organizations that deploy AI systems — from machine learning to computer vision to deep learning. The authors found that AI systems are augmenting human capabilities and enabling people and machines to work collaboratively, changing the very nature of work and transforming businesses.  

A symbiosis between man and machine is not here now, but it is already being called the third wave of business transformation and it concerns using adaptive processes. (The first wave was standardized processes, and the second was automated processes.)

Even when AI has advanced and humans and machines are symbiotic partners, humans will be needed. In this book, they identify three broad types of new jobs in the "missing middle" of the third wave. 

Trainers will be needed to teach AI systems how they should perform, helping natural-language processors and language translators make fewer errors and teaching AI algorithms how to mimic human behaviors.

Explainers will be needed to bridge the gap between technologists and business leaders, explaining the inner workings of complex algorithms to nontechnical professionals. 

The third category of jobs will involve sustainers who will ensure that AI systems are operating as designed. They might be in roles such as context designers, AI safety engineers and ethics compliance managers. For example, a safety engineer will try to anticipate and address the unintended consequences of an AI system, and a ethics complaince manager acts as ombudsmen for upholding generally accepted human values and morals.

And for education? These jobs will require new skills. The skills the authors describe all sound unfamiliar, as I suppose they should. Arewe ready to teach Rehumanizing Time, Responsible Normalizing, Judgment Integration, Intelligent Interrogation, Bot-Based Empowerment, Holistic Melding, Reciprocal Apprenticing, and Relentless Reimagining.

Their labels may be unfamiliar, but the skills can also be seen as extensions or advancements of more familiar ones in a new contect. 

For example, "Judgment Integration" is needed when a machine is uncertain about what to do or lacks necessary business or ethical context in its reasoning model. A human ready to be smart about sensing where, how and when to step in means that human judgment will still be needed even in a reimagined process. 

Imagine that autonomus vehicle approaching at high speed a deer and a child in the road ahead. It needs to swerve, but it will also need to hit one of them in its avoidance maneuver. Which would it choose? The decision will not be based on how we feel about a child versus a wild animal - unless a human has been involved in the process earlier.


Read more in the book and in "What Are The New Jobs In A Human + Machine World?" by Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson on forbes.com

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

Comments

Display comments as Linear | Threaded

No comments

The author does not allow comments to this entry