Source: The Primordial M

How is A.I. impacting your job now and in the future?

There is a tremendous amount of data generated today — so much that our normal databases cannot manage. It is estimated that by 2020, every person will be generating 1.7 megabytes of data in just a single second. If you think 1.7MBs are small then you might be thinking about data in terms of storage. But this is in terms of storage; in simple terms, a single character like A, B or 7 accounts for 1 byte, a document containing only 100 characters without any overhead such as symbols would use 100 bytes. One megabyte contains 1,000,000 bytes or one million characters. This means every second one person will be generating 1.7 million characters and subsequently 102 million characters every minute or 6.1 billion characters every hour. Can you now imagine how much data will be generated by the general world population altogether?

Since the data is growing rapidly, there’s a need to find new techniques that can handle this data efficiently. This is where Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and other popular buzz words come in.

But what is Artificial Intelligence, anyway?

If you have used a smartphone, a computer or the internet before, then you have definitely interacted with Artificial Intelligence many times. Artificial intelligence is actually an umbrella term that simply groups together all techniques related to making computers think and act intelligently.

A.I. has been implemented in tools such as smartphone keyboards to help predict words, video recommendations on YouTube, movie recommendations on Netflix, Apple’s Siri, Google’s self-driving cars, Facebook’s image recognition, personalized advertisements online, camera applications in smartphones and so many other areas. AI has in fact been adopted in a wide range of activities such as medical diagnosis, speech translation, customer services where it outperforming humans in startling ways. This is what has sparked up fears with people worried that A.I. will now out-compete humans rendering them unemployable and unable to compete with machines. Is any of this true?

List of jobs being changed by AI today:

1. Bank Tellers

When automated teller machines where introduced, one could have easily predicted that they would replace tellers, but this is not the case. ATMs simply reduced the costs of operations and allowed banks to open up more branches which in turn resulted in banks hiring more personnel to run other activities.

2. Lawyers and Paralegals

In the legal world, instead of paying an army of lawyers and paralegals to review documents, today softwares are being developed to handle the task. AI tools can read millions of documents in just a second, finding the exact passages needed, can review and flag specific documents and find similar relevant documents efficiently and can provide lawyers with insight from similar cases allowing room for predicting likely outcomes.

3. Drivers and Logistics

In the automobile world, there is already a significant number of autonomous cars on the road, so drivers could become a thing of the past thanks to the adoption of Artificial intelligence in self-driving cars. Google claims their self-driving cars are being developed to increase road safety, so who would want to be driven by unsafe human drivers.

4. Journalists

In journalism, artificial intelligence is being used to generate news reports such as compiling sports news briefs, earnings reports and other pieces of information. Although some Journalists worry that the robots reading and writing the news might lead to discrediting reliable media outlets by not producing quality content, some think this will just give reporters ample time to focus on other stories i.e. the ability to concentrate on quality over quantity.

And the list goes on…

5. Personal Assistants

Here’s the famous video of Google Duplex having a natural conversation to book a haircut appointment:

According to the Google blog, this is how it works:

Incoming sound is processed through an ASR system. This produces text that is analyzed with context data and other inputs to produce a response text that is read aloud through the TTS system.

Source: https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html

6. Customer Service Representatives

7. Receptionists

8. Data Entry Clerks

9. Teachers

10. Surgeons

Undoubtedly, A.I. will disrupt the employment world in the soon future, however, we should understand it and think of the opportunities it brings along.

“AI is all about figuring what to do when you don’t know what to do”

Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, 2001 NASA Exceptional Achievement Award winner.

AI will put the tremendous amounts of data generated in the future to good use. Use cases include building and training predictive models, easing analysis and in business; businesses will now understand customer habits much better and improve their decision making. The future will be shaped, not by having the right information but being able to turn that information into actionable plans.

List of jobs that will be created by AI:

1. Data Scientists
2. Artificial Intelligence Engineers
3. Machine Learning Engineers
4. Research Analysts
5. Research Scientists
6. Big Data Architects/Engineers

However, the value of AI lies not in creating entirely new industries and professions but rather in empowering current employees to add more value to existing enterprises; by taking over those tasks that do not require human intervention, AI will improve overall efficiency in operations. In addition to that, AI will perform the tasks precisely, making information more accurate. It is estimated that by 2022, about 50 percent of all companies will have reduced their full-time workforce due to AI while 40 percent are expected to extend their workforce due to AI. So AI is not coming to only take our jobs, it will also improve existing jobs and create new ones.

Written By Arthur Kakande, Communications Lead at Pollicy.

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