A ‘big data veteran’ and New York-based business leader has warned that even jobs in AI are threatened by the technology.
While the computer has changed the way most people do their jobs in the last hundred years, it’s nothing compared to the transformative effect AI will have in the next century.
That’s the view of Amir Orad,chief executive of business intelligence company Sisense.
“Jobs will be eliminated,” Orad told BusinessCloud. “It’s happening now, and it’s only going to accelerate.”
The serial CEO predicts that even modern jobs such as writing code “can be a tedious, manual process, and much of it will be automated by AI”.
But those planning to jump ship into the AI industry to cash in on its dominance might also be at risk from the technology, as it gets better at optimising itself.
“[AI] specialists will become redundant in the sense they won’t need to do a lot of the tasks they are performing now, but they won’t become irrelevant,” he said.
“At the pace that the technology is developing, there is the possibility that there will be a wave of newly minted AI graduates moving into a market where much of the labour-centric activity in AI has been taken over by the AI itself.”
But it’s not all doom-and-gloom for digital natives and hopeful AI developers of the future.
The New Yorker believes that AI students should not abandon the sector, and instead should consider bolstering their studies with creative and entrepreneurial applications, “and perhaps taking some liberal arts classes as well”.
Orad believes that as AI technology gets better at dealing with “sweeping up after the horses”, these experts will transition to jobs that put a higher value on creativity and skill.
“Innovation, creative problem solving, and empathy are currently out of reach for AI; computing jobs that require those characteristics will be the future of that industry,” he said.
“I’m still optimistic that there will be lots of work for humans to do, which can’t be done by machines.”