ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE FUTURE OF WORK: THE SEARCH FOR A HAPPY ENDING

A.I. will soon eliminate almost all meaningful jobs.

This seems to be the opinion held by many people who have encountered in one way or another, the wonderful achievements of Artificial Intelligence based technology.

Well, can we really blame them? Imagine walking into a banking hall, expecting that warm smile from your accustomed account officer, instead a robot asks how it may be of service to you. Or a restaurant, and the waiter is not that homely face you've been used to for months but a machine whose 'facial' expression you can't decipher.

After you struggle to come to terms with the new situation, your next train of thoughts become, what happened to the waiter? Or the banker? Do they have new jobs? Or have the machines secured slots for them in the unemployment office.

According to research, since the advent of Automated Teller Machines (ATM) in the early nineties, more bank tellers have been employed. Infact, the number of human bank tellers employed in the US has roughly doubled, from about a quarter of a million to half a million. This figures were gotten from a book by James Bessen, an Economist at the Boston University.

Machines, unlike humans, do not have cognitive abilities, hence cannot understand the feelings and emotions of customers. Therefore, they cannot respond adequately to their enquiries or handle their requests as effectively as they would desire. Again, we humans possess some inbuilt traits that will be almost impossible to programme into machines. Traits like; creativity, talent, improvisation, to name a few.

It is time for us to stop seeing AI as the enemy , rather as a collaborator in the approaching disruption soon to be witnessed in the world of work. Let us, rather than concentrating on the negative impacts of AI , focus on ways to put pressure on the government to significantly improve the country’s Human Capital Indicators* so that A.I. and humans will enjoy a harmonious relationship in the future of work, happily ever after if you like.

• Image courtesy of Getty Images.
• The Human Capital Indicators (HCI) were introduced by the world Bank in 2018 as a comprehensive measure of a country’s performance in specific areas such as Health, Survival and Education.