How is artificial intelligence affecting jobs?

Artificial intelligence (AI) can only affect specific tasks within jobs. It cannot affect replace entire jobs because it is really hard to unbundled AI-tasks from entire jobs without losing their overall quality.

Artificial intelligence often revolves around the use of algorithms, or a set of unambiguous instructions, rules of thumb, or patterns that the computer can understand, digitised and execute.

It works well where every possible hypothesis, possibility, or scenario can be humanly codified as unambiguous algorithms.

Artificial intelligence attempts to stimulate human thinking using machine-based learning and programming. It is based on prescribed sets of rules, algorithms, and patterns that can be codified or digitised by humans.

The key assumption here is that artificial intelligence really works well when we can convert specific tasks into machine language step-by-step reasoning or process that humans will use when they solve problems or make logical deductions.

It does take a lot of effort to digitally convert simple tasks that we can do so easily.

In 2012, it took a neural network of 16,000 processors to identify images of cats on YouTube!

As the processing power of computers increase and the computing cost decrease, we are able to increase the use of machine based learning to do more tasks that complement our jobs.

When this occurs, tasks performed by humans that are based on rules, algorithms, and patterns will most likely be replaced by artificial intelligence in the future.

From a job security perspective, what is good news for us is that artificial intelligence is extremely bad at human commonsense reasoning and interaction where the situation or environment constantly changes without patterns or when there are lots of random or unforeseen factors to consider.

Job task that uses a lot of rules, algorithms and patterns are great candidates for artificial intelligence. This includes information gathering and matching.

For example, artificial intelligence can match two different sets of data and can tell you which ones are exact matches.

Computers can do a much better job than humans in comparing the vast volume of information. They can compare information collected from patients with a library of thousands or millions of sample information within a matter of seconds.

When an exact or near match is found, options are presented. The human analysis will take over based on the short-listed patterns presented by artificial intelligence.

There’s also a mobile app where it can ‘scan’ a mole on the skin to determine whether it is cancerous. This is done by artificial intelligence comparing the picture taken by the mobile phone with a vast picture library of potentially cancerous moles.

When potential matches are found, it will tell the user of the potentiality. Based on this information, the person can decide whether to see their doctor or not, all within the comforts of their home and within minutes.

Unnecessary doctor visits can be avoided. The medical cost can be reduced.

Here’s the thing.

Artificial intelligence has made significant in-roads in transforming or refining specific tasks within jobs. It has yet to transform entire jobs.

This means that we still have time on our side to future-proof ourselves from the potential negative impact of artificial intelligence as more tasks are AI-enabled within jobs.

The pace of AI-transformation will depend on a number of factors.

Unless we are flexible to adapt to these reshaping of our jobs, we can be made redundant very quickly.

If you are an HR practitioner, the role of human resources in organisations will become so vital to ensure that employees can also be transformed with new skills as tasks within jobs are also transformed by artificial intelligence.