AI will create jobs, not stealing them

As mentioned before, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is essentially transforming our reality; becoming more and more sophisticated in a short time, tasks that once exclusively were for humans are opening up to machines and robots, as they are learning to interact with humans not just to follow instructions.

Robots are doing today works that humans can not do, but with the latest technological breakthroughs, machines are also entering on jobs that require personalized skills —situational awareness and dexterity, spatial reasoning, contextual understanding, or human judgment. The first wave of labor substitution from automation came from works that were often dangerous, tedious, hazardous, or repetitive to humans.

Over time, automation had displaced, preserved, and created new jobs that are entirely different from those existing today. Scientists do not believe AI will completely replace human work, but just some parts of them and leaving other parts behind. The new emerging jobs will require skills and training that have no precedents; humans in those roles will complement the tasks performed by cognitive technologies and overseeing the work of machines and robots.

The MIT Sloan Management Review joint with Accenture studied +1,000 large companies testing or already using some form of AI systems. Their The Jobs That Artificial Intelligence Will Create study categorized the rise of three emerging kinds of AI-development job roles, in which humans will ensure that the work of machines is effective, fair, transparent, and auditable:

- Trainers to teach AI systems how they should perform, helping to reduce errors from natural-language processors and language translators while guiding AI algorithms on how to mimic human behaviors.

- Explainers to describe the inner workings of complex algorithms to nontechnical people. These professionals will provide clarity, which is becoming all the more critical as AI systems’ opaqueness increases.

- Sustainers to ensure AI systems are operating as designed, also to address unintended consequences with the appropriate urgency.


The upcoming workforce generation will need skills that can not be imagined these days and will require emerging cognitive technologies like AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and more. Gartner's The Predicts 2018: AI and the Future of Work estimate 2020 will be a pivotal year for the AI-related employment dynamics: 2.3 Million Jobs will be created while eliminating 1.8 Million, reaching 2 Million net-new AI-related jobs in 2025. 20% of the workers engaged in mostly nonroutine tasks will rely on AI to do a job by 2022.

There is no question that globalization is responsible for some of the job losses, but is generating value too. Several countries are foreseeing an urging need to adapt their workforces, economies and business models, population and society, and culture to synch with this disruption and be ready to the new generation of jobs, as AI will create jobs, not stealing them.