How AI is shaping the way we work and live.
This article originally appeared in GAM Times.
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People tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short term, but underestimate it in the longer term. This phenomenon known as Amara’s Law, could be a part of a reason why AI has become such a hot topic. This not-so new technology (in fact, AI been around with us since 50s) is gaining more presence in our lives and workplaces, but its great impact is yet to happen.
So far, we have seen polarised views between those who believe we’re in the middle of an AI bubble that will eventually cool off, and those with more dystopian views painting AI makers as evils, who will aim to hijack our minds fulfilling an AI-driven Terminator-like apocalypse. Each of these visions may be born out of inherent fear of the unknown flavoured with a pinch of a genuine curiosity, but they are usually exaggerated. They miss what AI really is about.
Speculation varies wildly because AI appears complex and entirely different to how we’ve been building technology so far, hence the general climate remains cautious. Most companies are aware of the existence of AI but they watch its development from afar. The truth is, AI, like most technologies, is inherently neither good nor evil. AI is just like any other tech, a tool created by humans for humans. And I strongly believe that, like most technologies, it will produce more positive than negative impact in our lives and workplaces.
Why AI is a game changer
As humanity, we progressed due to our unique ability to learn — because of this learning we can progress at scale. That’s also the main domain of AI, and that’s what makes it stand out from any other technology that has ever been created. AI is unlike traditional programming, where you had to manually write the logic that the program uses to produce output from the input data. With AI, you train machine learning models by feeding them examples, similar to how children learn.
And just like children, AI can learn anything quickly, meaning its intelligence is increasing. The power of AI lies in its ability to continuously improve with more data, dramatically exceeding human performance for single-domain, logic-driven tasks.
AI is already here.
Let’s admit it — these days the world runs on technology. You may have heard the words economist Paul Krugman said in 1998 that “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”? If the only constant is change, then a tech evolution and increasing adoption of AI in our everyday lives is unavoidable. You definitely don’t want to fall behind the curve.
You’re already surrounded by AI-powered inventions, sometimes without even knowing they use AI. Alexa, Uber, Amazon recommendation engines — they’re all stuffed with AI. AI-powered robots are everywhere, from those robots cleaning your house learning your schedule to AI-enabled drones delivering blood to the most remote places.
Data shows that the use of AI in many sectors of business has grown by 270% over the last four years. A recent paper published by the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future entitled “Artificial Intelligence And The Future of Work,” looked closely at developments in AI and their relation to the world of work. The paper paints an optimistic picture, predicting that AI will continue to drive massive innovation that will fuel many existing industries and could have the potential to create many new sectors for growth, ultimately leading to the creation of more jobs.
AI also is on the verge of making our ever increasing body of knowledge accessible and usable. I believe that the current way of working and drawing from company knowledge is broken. AI is a promise of giving people control back over how they interact with data and knowledge locked in it. If we are able to do that, employees could work more independently, test ideas faster and build on top of what’s already been created — company’s tribal knowledge and its collective wisdom. Management could be presented with solutions for approval, rather than problems on how to start.
AI adoption will be expanded to more and more industries and domains, until eventually it will know us better than we know ourselves. Websites, apps, and other digital devices will know our motivations through not only every click, purchase, but every action capturing a full spectrum of our emotions through speech and vision. This will have profound consequences for everything from how we work and play, to how we communicate and learn.
Shaping the way we work with AI
When we look at the work environment, Natural Language Processing (NLP), a type of AI helping computers to understand the complexity of human language, is already successfully used to help HR sort candidates, propose the right ones for the role or provide better matches for review. Up to 75% of resumes are rejected by an automated applicant tracking system, before they even reach a human being.
In the past, recruiters have had to devote considerable time to screening resumes to look for relevant candidates. In 2018, 67% of hiring managers stated that AI was making their jobs easier. As algorithms become more accurate by gathering and learning from more data, in the future, AI could directly email arranging interviews with candidates that fit the role, all that without human intervention.
AI is also widely present in the financial industry. Tasks like expense reports and audit alerts — many of the things that entry-level employees are often asked to do — are being automated with a great success, since AI feeds and thrives on quantitative data. But it’s not only HR and Finance that is ripe for AI innovation. Legal, marketing and customer service are next in line. Once the complexities of a language are decrypted thanks to NLP, AI algorithms can very well automate most mundane logic-driven tasks in these fields. AI can empower and work alongside human agents to suggest answers based on the past, similar cases.
Once enough data is collected and models have perfected their accuracy to be near human-like, those phone calls or email replies could be fully automated. It will lead not only to equivalent or greater customer satisfaction and a comparable resolution rate but also to intelligent attempts to upsell your products at the end of each customer service case.
Impact on quality of our lives
At the same time AI is pervading the workforce, it is also improving our lives in meaningful ways — including our healthcare. Right now, the health industry is being digitised, with everything from data from patient records, to radiology or wearable computing. Doctors no longer need to split their attention between listening to the patient and filling forms of registered symptoms on a computer. Speech-to-text powered AI technology can automatically input what a patient is reporting, giving a doctor peace of mind that nothing will be missed.
AI is revolutionising the entire healthcare value chain from diagnosis and treatment to also health alerts, monitoring, and long-term care. The effects of applying AI are already seen in radiology, pathology and drug discovery. A great example may be an algorithm developed by Stanford researchers to assess chest X-rays for signs of disease. Their AI can now recognise up to 14 types of medical conditions, with one particularly surprising result: AI is better at diagnosing pneumonia than several expert radiologists working together.
Millions of people across the world have already got their COVID-19 vaccines, and that’s thanks to AI. The pace and scale of the vaccine rollout has been unprecedented, and AI played a crucial role in it. Healthcare organisations harnessed AI and machine learning to schedule vaccines, streamline patient communications and even prioritise access.
AI is also helping human scientists invent many drugs at much lower costs, thereby finding cures for rare diseases. Only with AI we’re able to achieve personalised recommendations at scale, almost at no extra cost. That makes AI a great candidate for a pioneering field of “precision medicine,” an area of applied science that tailors individualised treatments for a given patient, instead of treating with one-size-fits-all drugs.
Safer, more efficient transport
Transportation is another industry where AI has been making positive headlines. As autonomous vehicles are becoming more and more accepted, this will have a massive potential to make people’s lives more comfortable on the road, bringing you from A to B at lower cost, greater convenience and better safety.
It is being estimated that autonomous cars will become the safest drivers on the road, eventually reducing 90% of traffic fatalities.
Enhancing education systems
Alongside healthcare and transportation, education has probably the biggest potential to impact our lives for the better, starting already in our childhood years.
Although still at its infancy, AI can eventually become our children’s most effective teachers, grading exams and answering questions with greater precision and patience than any human can. And unlike the current system where teachers have to consider the whole class, an AI-powered teacher application could address each student’s specific needs. Considering mental awareness, talents and other abilities, AI will be able to give each student different exercises, based on his or her pace, ensuring a given student achieves a full mastery of a topic before moving to the next. With ever-more data available, AI will make learning much more effective, engaging, and fun.
Things we need to consider today to build an ethical AI serving everyone.
To design effective, inclusive tools for everyone, we must consider the current flaws of human behaviour and make sure we don’t replicate the same mistakes in our AI algorithms. When there’s a lack of diversity, there’s a lack of diverse thoughts. If the population that is creating the technology is homogeneous, we’re going to get technology that is designed and works well for that specific population.
Many researchers have highlighted how judges’ decisions can be unconsciously influenced by their own personal beliefs. In workplaces, it’s been well documented for employers granting interviews at different rates to candidates with identical resumes but with names considered to reflect different racial groups.
Human decisions are also difficult to review: people may lie about the factors they considered, or may not understand the factors that influenced their thinking, leaving room for unconscious bias.
AI can help reduce or reinforce such biases, depending on who designs it.
A recent research from MIT has underscored this point, where researchers found evidence that facial recognition systems recognise white faces better than black faces. In particular, the study found that if the photo was of a white man, the systems guessed correctly more than 99 percent of the time. But for black women, the percentage was between 20 percent and 34 percent. Such biases have implications for the use of facial recognition for law enforcement, advertising and hiring.
However, with the correct level of oversight and governance, AI could result in the workplace of the future becoming a far more diverse, meritocratic, and even harmonious place for employees.
Extreme misuse of AI technologies such as deep fakes, political polarisation or autonomous weapons can lead to major threats, so we should make sure to address privacy and security issues as top priority.
The effect of AI on jobs is totally within our control, but only if we consciously think of and work towards the outcomes we want to achieve. This isn’t what we let AI do to the workforce, it’s how we control its use for the wellness of the workforce.
Immense potential of AI implies a massive change in the way we work. It is necessary to act now putting in place measures to counteract impending job losses. Retraining the workforce, rethinking how entry-level jobs look like and taking advantage of the countless new jobs created by the merging of AI optimisation and the human touch will all be required. It will be a huge shift, but overall, a positive one. The mix of occupations will change, as will skills in demand. Work will need to be redesigned to ensure that humans work alongside machines most effectively, creating a “bionic organisation.”
While it will take some time until some AI technologies become the norm, the worrying fact is that only few companies are taking action to train their workers on how to work and create AI. Accenture research shows business leaders don’t think that their workers are ready for AI. But only 3% of those leaders were reinvesting in training.
What jobs AI won’t be able to automate?
While AI has made major strides toward replicating the efficacy of human intelligence in executing certain logic-based, repetitive tasks, there are still major limitations.
It will be long until AI is able to reach (if ever) a “generalised intelligence” responsible for problem solving, abstract thinking, thinking outside of the box and critical judgement. Human judgement will continue to be relevant in business, if not in every task, then certainly throughout every strategic level across all sectors.
The other category that AI won’t be able to replicate is human-to-human touch. People really don’t want to trust AI to be their lawyers, psychiatrists or their health care professionals. For at least 30 years, if not longer, that will still be a role for humans to hold.
Although we can’t yet think of how the jobs of the future will look like, there will certainly be plenty of new ones supporting human-computer ties; robot repair people, autonomous vehicle repair people, robotics scientists, AI researchers, and data scientists or individuals who collect data, since AI is all about data.
The future is bright
I look forward into the future where AI will create efficient services that will give us back our most valuable resource — time. I feel lucky to be able to be part of that revolution and via my work at Untrite, contribute to removing routine tasks and liberating people to do more stimulating ones.
People use technology to solve problems of our own nature, to reach beyond our limitations. AI is the perfect candidate, as it enhances the speed, precision and effectiveness of our efforts. I believe we should advocate for the “Human plus AI” approach — using AI systems alongside humans, not instead of them. We should employ AI while keeping humans in the loop making them more efficient, productive and happy. As we progress with AI, we’ll be able to figure out not just how to solve problems but what problems to solve. With AI we’re finally able to get more comprehensive insight on what the patterns are. We can work on things we enjoy and leave the mundane, repetitive tasks to robots who do a better job than us. With AI we’re finally humanising work.
