Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) going to take your job? You’d think so, if you read how the media has cited reports by PwC and McKinsey.
But if you read the actual details, the picture is subtler and even optimistic. A line from the executive summary of McKinsey’s report “Harnessing automation for a future that works” states: “While less than 5 percent of all occupations can be automated entirely using demonstrated technologies, about 60 percent of all occupations have at least 30 percent of constituent activities that could be automated.” To me, that does not sound like the employment Armageddon portrayed in some media. In fact, if 30 percent of my job were automated, just think how much more productive I could be.
Furthermore, McKinsey says “the world’s economy will actually need every erg of human labor working, in addition to the robots, to overcome demographic aging trends in both developed and developing economies. In other words, a surplus of human labor is much less likely to occur than a deficit of human labor.”
So how do you distill the truth given varying opinion and decide the impact on your business?
Machine learning, a subset of AI, will almost certainly transform the world. Advances in the last 12 months, demonstrate the potential. In early 2017, Libratus beat the best pro poker players in the world. DeepMind created AlphaGo Zero, which taught itself to become the best Go player on the planet. Then last November, AlphaGo Zero became a superhuman chess and Shogi player in less than 24 hours. Not only are the algorithms getting more powerful, they’re also becoming more efficient.
It is clearly an exciting period for technology, but for analytics, does this mean firing your team and going all in with AI? I don’t think so, and in fact, I advise against it. Tim Harford argues that AlphaGo is actually an outlier, and corporations are getting less and less involved in groundbreaking scientific research. Not only that, finding the talent to successfully run machine learning projects is very hard; the big tech firms swallow up the brightest talent before they’ve graduated, as reported by the Economist in “Battle of the Brains.”
Attend any business technology conference and the agenda will be full of AI and machine learning sessions. At those events, the message is much more mundane than the bleeding-edge technology described above.
