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Challenge
zohaab Ishrat Aug 31, 2020
Automation of Non-Essential Job Roles
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The Ask:
Due to the recently ensued pandemic of COVID-19, a lot of employees had to discover it the hard way that their role is classified under the tag of non-essential. Organizations are now becoming increasingly aware of the numerous processes which can be automated. This, in turn, will not only benefit corporations in terms of cost-saving but also increase productivity. The situation begs the question of, is automation truly the next step in the industrial revloution? Will it not eradicate millions of jobs worldwide? Will this development turn out to be counterproductive in the long run?
The Insight:
As the novel Coronavirus struck the major economies around the globe, millions lost their jobs. As the businesses had to stop operations, they were able to realize that to compensate for the losses they were suffering; they had to reduce their staff while ensuring they still retained key employees.
Numerous job roles were deemed to be non-essential and in the light of recent events, the value, and importance of business automation, and the role of digital transformation has been increased significantly.
Instead of having repetitive and relatively simple tasks to be performed by a human, the task can be automated and a computer or a machine can be employed to keep performing it in an accurate and precise fashion.
But replacing the workforce with machines will result in an increased number of people ending up jobless. The more people ending up jobless, the fewer people available to act as consumers. This makes the entire exercise counterproductive in the long run; or does it?
Call to Action:
Does the trend truly pose a threat to numerous employment roles? To better prepare for the future, organizations need to take appropriate measures to ensure that they are ready to face another global pandemic. The debate ensues; what should the employees do in this situation? Should they upskill or switch job roles to the ones that are less likely to be replaced by machines? Will that concentrate certain segments of the job market and leave others hollow?
2
Creative contributions
A New Useless Class
At least for a few more decades, human intelligence is likely to far exceed computer intelligence in numerous fields. Hence as computers take over more routine cognitive jobs, new creative jobs for humans will continue to appear. Many of these new jobs will probably depend on cooperation rather than competition between humans and AI. Human-AI teams will likely prove superior not just to humans, but also to computers working on their own.
However, most of the new jobs will presumably demand high levels of expertise and ingenuity, and therefore may not provide an answer to the problem of unemployed unskilled laborers, or workers employable only at extremely low wages. Moreover, as AI continues to improve, even jobs that demand high intelligence and creativity might gradually disappear. The world of chess serves as an example of where things might be heading. For several years after IBM’s computer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997, human chess players still flourished; AI was used to train human prodigies, and teams composed of humans plus computers proved superior to computers playing alone.
Yet in recent years, computers have become so good at playing chess that their human collaborators have lost their value and might soon become entirely irrelevant. On December 6, 2017, another crucial milestone was reached when Google’s AlphaZero program defeated the Stockfish 8 program. Stockfish 8 had won a world computer chess championship in 2016. It had access to centuries of accumulated human experience in chess, as well as decades of computer experience. By contrast, AlphaZero had not been taught any chess strategies by its human creators—not even standard openings. Rather, it used the latest machine-learning principles to teach itself chess by playing against itself. Nevertheless, out of 100 games that the novice AlphaZero played against Stockfish 8, AlphaZero won 28 and tied 72—it didn’t lose once. Since AlphaZero had learned nothing from any human, many of its winning moves and strategies seemed unconventional to the human eye. They could be described as creative, if not downright genius.
Can you guess how long AlphaZero spent learning chess from scratch, preparing for the match against Stockfish 8, and developing its genius instincts? Four hours. For centuries, chess was considered one of the crowning glories of human intelligence. AlphaZero went from utter ignorance to creative mastery in four hours, without the help of any human guide.
AlphaZero is not the only imaginative software out there. One of the ways to catch cheaters in chess tournaments today is to monitor the level of originality that players exhibit. If they play an exceptionally creative move, the judges will often suspect that it could not possibly be a human move—it must be a computer move. At least in chess, creativity is already considered to be the trademark of computers rather than humans! So if chess is our canary in the coal mine, we have been duly warned that the canary is dying. What is happening today to human-AI teams in chess might happen down the road to human-AI teams in policing, medicine, banking, and many other fields.
For example, many drivers are unfamiliar with all the changing traffic regulations on the roads they drive, and they often violate them. In addition, since every driver is a singular entity when two vehicles approach the same intersection, the drivers sometimes miscommunicate their intentions and collide. Self-driving cars, by contrast, will know all the traffic regulations and never disobey them on purpose, and they could all be connected to one another. When two such vehicles approach the same junction, they won’t really be two separate entities, but part of a single algorithm. The chances that they might miscommunicate and collide will therefore be far smaller.
Similarly, if the World Health Organization identifies a new disease, or if a laboratory produces a new medicine, it can’t immediately update all the human doctors in the world. Yet even if you had billions of AI doctors in the world—each monitoring the health of a single human being—you could still update all of them within a split second, and they could all communicate to one another their assessments of the new disease or medicine. These potential advantages of connectivity and upgradeability are so huge that at least in some lines of work, it might make sense to replace all humans with computers, even if individually some humans still do a better job than the machines.
All of this leads to one very important conclusion: The automation revolution will not consist of a single watershed event, after which the job market will settle into some new equilibrium. Rather, it will be a cascade of ever bigger disruptions. Old jobs will disappear and new jobs will emerge, but the new jobs will also rapidly change and vanish. People will need to retrain and reinvent themselves not just once, but many times.
Reference
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/
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"A fine line": a case study
This is one of those questions asking about a fine line between what jobs should be kept for humans regardless of how much AI advances.
Since it is a very broad matter, I propose a recent case study I stumbled upon and that got me curious.
Namely, many companies have started switching to the AI call centers, where you are actually talking to the quite humanoid AI. And while in the US (which is a separate topic) they have many problems with robocalls, since around ~45% percent are scam (at least the prediction for 2019.said so), we are witnessing an increase in the calls behind which legitimate companies lie, paying a different dollar for human workers and AI maintenance and development, thus deciding on pursuing the latter. So far, it is mainly used for surveys and telemarketing, and at the first sight sounds benign, even relaxing. Most of those AIs still sound too "emotionless" when caught off-guard, and all of them never really answer the question: "Are you a robot?" with anything other than: "I am a human person.", so at some point you can see through them.
However, on the other hand they are becoming increasingly good with complicated terminology in their bank or other tele-marketing offers, and at the first sight impossible to crack. But replacing humans on the end of the large world of sales skills is a whole new level. As we know, sales entail many skills, starting from diction, voice, and most of all, a fair portion of psychology. And while all those can be fine tuned to some extent, a real-deal sale will always require a dose of a raw "human touch" to work on those bigger scales. So, what happens if/when we develop these AIs to do these kinds of work? Additionally, should we let it overflow in such domains of our lives?
Traditionally, SF has portrayed specifically such highly sophisticated kinds of AIs, based on the well-known premise of the Turing test. However, the question still remains, and it branches into, most simply saying: a) Shall we let it?; b) Are the consequences another job-market revolutions or something more?