How can you make a decision on the future of your company and employment needs when you don’t know what to expect? By this point we know that AI is going to have a major impact on employment and staffing in the next decade, but how? In the most recent survey of the Future of the Internet, a vast majority of responders anticipate that robotics and artificial intelligence will permeate wide segments of daily life by 2025. Although they are consistent in their predictions for the evolution of technology, they are deeply divided on how advances in AI and robotics will impact the economic and employment picture over the next decade.
In this survey 1,896 experts were surveyed. 48% of these experts envision a future where robotics will have displaced a significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers. On the other hand 52% of the experts expect that technology will not displace more jobs than it creates by 2025. To be sure, this group anticipates that many jobs currently performed by humans will be substantially taken over by robots or digital agents by 2025. But they have faith that human ingenuity will create new jobs, industries, and ways to make a living, just as it has been doing since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
This week let’s take a look at the top 3 arguments to support AI creating more jobs.
- Look to History
According to CEO of Mondo, a niche tech and digital marketing staffing agency, to see proof of why AI won’t take all of our jobs, you just need to look at history. Whenever there is a major advancement in how we work, there is a fear that all the jobs will go away. While there is always an impact, the tail-end of the Industrial Revolution, for example, led to the assembly line; the workforce remains stable throughout these changes because new jobs are created as a result.
- Out with the Old and In With the New
As advancements in technology continue new jobs will be created and others will be displaced.
A recent study surveying 992 companies in a variety of sectors and countries with revenues of $500 million that are implementing AI as either a pilot project or “at scale” by technology consulting group Capgemini, supports the belief that the integration of AI will create jobs, rather than destroy them. 83% of respondents in the survey reported new jobs were created as a result of AI implementation. Additionally, 63% reported AI had not destroyed jobs in their organization. These findings support the recent analysis by Gartner that AI will create 2.3 million jobs in 2020 while eliminating 1.8 million.
- AI Augmentation (Humans AND Machines)
First off, what is AI Augmentation? It is the combination of human and AI, where the two work together to supplement each other and make up for what the other lacks.
A recent McKinsey study found that few occupations are fully automatable, but 60% of all occupations have at least 30% technically automatable activities. Many argue that some jobs require uniquely human characteristics such as empathy, creativity, judgment, or critical thinking—and that jobs of this nature will never succumb to widespread automation.
We need to look at AI as an opportunity to find ways to do our jobs more efficiently and effectively, without replacing the human component. Instead, AI can free the individual up to focus on tasks they do better than an AI system.
Take a look at our post on the ways employers can Redesign Roles And Responsibilities To Accommodate The Future Of AI.
Stay tuned for our next article where we will dive into the expert’s argument on AI displacing jobs.
