Image by Reto Scheiwiller from Pixabay
With the huge advancement and explosion in AI we have had over the last few years it is with little surprise that many people will be worrying about whether it will affect their job security. Could I be replaced by an AI or some other system that can automate my job and therefore put me out of it?
For myself I think these worries, although somewhat valid, are generally over-stated and causes unnecessary fear against an emerging technology that will be far more assistive towards humans and overall increase job satisfaction and create more meaningful work. It will allow more time for more abstract and complex work as AI is implemented to phase out many repetitive tasks that tend to waste time and be boring within a role.
That is much more time for learning in the job for many and putting their effort into something that can produce far more passion and excitement for work. And even in tasks that cannot be fully automated by AI, humans can still use AI to guide them through processes and in some cases do better work by improving the way something is done or executed. It makes it easier to learn for someone on a job if they are able to use AI to support them.
Of course, it is very important to not become entirely reliant on AI at the same time. Just as humans are fallible so to are the AI they create. There are many instances where AI suggest a poorer approach to a task or is even outright wrong about something. This is why testing and experimentation is also very important. You can prompt a concept through an AI platform and then test it against your own methods or the methods that exist within usual documentation.
In actuality testing is standard in pretty much any process to ensure as best as possible that nothing goes wrong when something goes live.
The ability for a human to learn a wide array of subjects remains superior to that of an AI, and humans will be better at doing something earlier on than an AI that would be much worse off doing something it hasn’t been trained on. An AI is also not good at dealing with unexpected outcomes or disruption to its usual process, so if a problem occurs the AI may not be able to solve the issue because it doesn’t know the correct process to do so. A human on the other hand has the ability to think in an abstract and un-restricted fashion and can better handle unexpected situations that come up in an otherwise mundane task.
The above means that AI that perform mundane task automation would still need to be supervised by humans to ensure that something unexpected doesn’t cause an issue in the process. In this sense the fact that AI isn’t actually sentient means humans remain far more capable. We have the ability to adapt quicker and far better than an AI can, and we are also supreme at finding loopholes and new strategies, including ones that enable us to sometimes beat an AI at its own game.
Although there are self-learning AI it remains in its infancy and the entire process is overviewed by human workers who organise the training data and perform much testing to make sure that the learning is actually beneficial and effective for the AI.
There is currently no AI that can continue independently without human assistance. This is why we should not even be close to worrying about AI replacing us, instead we should view them as assistants that improve our job experience and satisfaction.
Everytime something new comes along there is always some kind of existential and irrational worry about it.
This is our defensive mechanism warning us that something new that we do not fully understand or comprehend could be a threat and so we should fear it. But pretty much every time such worries never end up coming to fruition. Sure, there is danger in everything but most of the time the biggest dangers are caused by the actions of humans, human error. At the same time human intervention can be better at catching a random event than an AI or computer system.
People were scared of electricity when it first came along. They were scared of automobiles when they first came along. There was fear over computers when they first came along and then mobile devices, and even fear in those technologies still exist. But many of the greatet fears of those technologies were never realised and have done far more positive than negative for humans. AI is going to be the same, and whatever advancement comes after that will cause yet more anxiety, fear, and worry about what it could lead to.
But, humans always find a way to adapt and work with things. It will be the same with AI. Although it isn’t impossible that automation could lose you a job, it is a much smaller chance compared to other reasons for losing a job. Your job remains far more in danger from the issue of budgeting, micro-management and economics than it does from AI automation. Many jobs have been lost in the tech sector recently but that has not been due to AI taking over, instead it was due to overhiring during the pandemic, cause: human error.
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