How AI Will Change Employment

Much has been made recently of the rise of AI and a scare campaign on the jobs that are suddenly going to disappear. If we look at the history of technology, we can see there have been many occasions when the next big thing was going to disrupt society and that it really did not happen. In fact, there have only really been a small number of occasions when that has happened, when computing technology because available to everyday consumers, the rise of the internet and introduction of smartphones.

If we look at the history of jobs and what jobs people did even during the 1980’s we see that jobs have changed quite a bit since then, there really isn’t less jobs as such now then we have seen in the past, in fact there are more jobs over the past few years as the jobs market has boomed. History teaches us that the number of jobs available in each industry will always change, some will go up and others will go down. If you look for example at the number of people who work in factories now vs 40 years ago, or look at how large the IT industry is compared to 40 years ago, you can see that this is nothing new. Automation in industry is nothing new either, and automation improvements in various industries been happening for a long time. In fact many factories are run by machines these days, that there is less and less people manaully making things than there were in the past, the people are employed to keep the machines running, upgrade and maintain them. The jobs we are employed in today are vastly different to those 100 years ago. The same will be true in the next 100 years.

Companies have always been looking for ways to reduce costs and this has been happening for a long time. For a long while operations have been moved offshore to reduce costs. The most common example of this is call canters which are often run from countries that have a much lower employment costs (such as India). So, when some media outlets around the world running a scare campaign again run by the media suggesting AI is coming for your jobs, then this is quite overstated.

So, what is happening with AI then? Well, the same thing that happened with the introduction of personal computers. That is disruption. That is jobs will change, people will be in some ways be more productive, just as they are today compared with dealing with manual paperwork in the past. AI is a tool, just like a computer, calculator or smartphone. It will redefine what people do just as we don’t have typists sitting using typewriters or lots of people to manually build things in factories. As things get more efficient over time, whole new industries will be created to replace the old ones, new jobs will be created, old ones eliminated, and many people’s roles will change.

New Technology brings with it a whole new set of challenges, a whole new set of things to be solved, and with it jobs to manage those challenges.

So how can you prepare for this change. Embrace it, learn about it, and use AI in your day-to-day life. AI has its uses, but it is not a replacement for people, it does not think like a person, and it makes mistakes. Use it like any other tool, which when used properly can be very powerful, but can be a trap for people to use blindly.