In the first post of this series, I’ve written my thoughts about the rise of Artificial Intelligence, and how it will serve as an enabler for ever greater progress. In this one, I deal with its (hopefully) short-term implications.
What about (un)employment?
As we’ve seen, despite all current impressive technological advancements, jobs and professions that call for increased inventiveness and creativity, will remain under human control in the foreseeable future. Even more so for jobs where emotions and empathy play a great role.
The same cannot be said for the kind of job, whether manual or mental, that requires little or no creativity. Software and machines will sooner or later take over those jobs, which opens the question of what will that mean for employment (or its lack thereof).
The example of a startup called SMACC is particularly apt here — they’ve recently received funding to develop their software for automating accounting for SMEs, something that, if successful, will help put millions of accountants (or at least assistant accountants) out of a job.
We live, and will continue to live for the next few decades, in a great transition. And while nobody can deny the impact on unemployment of such transitional periods (when millions of people discover that the thing they’ve studied or worked on for all their lives is suddenly obsolete), nobody can seriously propose slowing down progress as a solution either.
Besides, we’re not that far from the era when “computers” were actually humans, usually women, that were called that way because they were tasked to perform (using pen and paper) thousands of calculations every day for big enterprises, research centres, and similar organisations.
If the fear of automation had prevailed at that time, those human “computers” would still have a job, but you would have not had the chance to read this post on your PC (since it would not exist), or do anything else on the web (which would also not exist). And considered how dull their job must have been, and how many people were freed from it to take over something more challenging and ambitious, you will probably agree that the net result has been a positive one.
Even geniuses have the right to be wrong
Many great men and women, including notable intellectuals like the Stephen Hawking, have expressed their concerns about the advancements in AI, suggesting that such research much be performed with the utmost care, be heavy regulated, or even prohibited altogether.
I could not disagree more.
And I’m not saying that there is no danger, just that the danger is not qualitatively different than the danger from fire, tens of thousands of years ago, from gunpowder, a few centuries back, or from nuclear energy, a few decades back. There is, of course, a quantitative difference, concerning the possible catastrophic impact of new technologies — but that doesn’t mean that society cannot take precautions and sufficiently protect itself.
We have been playing with fire (pun intended) for a long time, and as always advance technology requires and advanced society, and an advanced civilisation. That’s the real challenge, then, and that’s what we should be striving to build, instead of trying to stifle technology.
Let me be clearer on how I view the upcoming economic transformation kickstarted by advanced AI (a transformation that is already underway, to be precise):
In the modern enterprise, there is a number of relatively trivial tasks that are performed by humans. I refer to tasks such as data entry, invoicing, answering and forwarding calls, and even some more advanced ones, like stock market analysis. All of these tasks, and a whole lot more besides, will soon be performed by programs that are (more or less) “intelligent”. Obviously, this will make a great number of office jobs obsolete.
That’s nothing to be afraid of. In the same way that there’s nothing wrong for a car to be assembled by machines, there’s nothing wrong for eventually having machines perform trivial office tasks (or even not at all trivial tasks, like surgical operations, somewhere further down the line). It just means that those tasks will be performed better, faster and cheaper — and this will benefit everybody.
The difficult transitional period
There’s of course the question of finding new employment for all those people that are today employed to perform such tasks, and who, at least initially (and until the labor market is able to absorb and compensate for each new innovation) will be left without a job — with all the resulting economic, social and psychological issues that will result from that.
Special care should be taken for these people (from re-education programs to financial and psychological support), especially those that are not prepared to start a new and different career in the post-automation business landscape.
That will be even more pressing for people that, whether due to advanced age or limited educational background, will be left, like those 19th-century weavers, on the wrong side of those who’ll benefit from automation.
Numerous solutions have been proposed (from back-to-work programs to “guaranteed minimum income” schemes), and while the optimal solution remains elusive, what’s clear is that it would be a tragic mistake (with enormous social impact) to just leave all those people unaided.
At the same time, our educational system should change drastically in order to prepare the new generations for the upcoming (and, in some ways, already here), labor market.
During our discussion in Milan, Federico asked me “how many secretaries” do I know “with a university degree”, and what do I reckon is their overall percentage in the market.
I said that I know quite a few, and I was surprised to learn that the percentage of secretaries with university education is well over 85%. What does that mean? Several things: for one, the role of a secretary is more demanding now that it has ever been. In most SMEs, the secretary is at the epicentre of many workflows. But, even more importantly, it means that there’s a huge disparity between people studying and available job positions.
Today’s university fails to prepare young people for the new labor market. It’s based on the conditions met by the previous generation — if that. “Information workers”, i.e. office workers that performed some heavily repetitive tasks in front of a PC are already relics of another era. They will soon be replaced by AI-enhanced software systems that will perform the same tasks cheaper, faster and better.
I’m willing to bet that soon enough (perhaps after a few decades) the only line of work in an advanced economy that will still make sense for humans to undertake will be that of Research and Development (whether in a scientific or an entrepreneurial sense) ― that, and anything related to arts and culture (a great reminder that science and entrepreneurialism comprise, along with the arts, the main outlets for human creativity).
(to be continued…)
Dimitris Tsingos
Founder and CEO,
StartTech Ventures
P.S. This post is the second of a three-part series of posts in which I express my views and concerns about AI. If you’d rather read the whole thing now, it is available on Medium, where it was originally published.
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