Where Do Humans Fit Into An Artificially Intelligent Future?
Nobody doubts the power of artificial intelligence to make our world a better, safer place. A recent study estimated that autonomous vehicles will prevent up to 350,000 accident-related injuries by the year 2025. But how many jobs will be lost by then, and can we even begin to predict the impact such change will have on our culture? In a CES 2017 SuperSession, a panel of experts discuss the future of humanity in a world that is increasingly being shaped by AI.
Vivienne Ming, co-founder of Socos, admits to “drinking the Kool-Aid” on AI years ago; some of her recent work in data intelligence includes anticipating manic episodes in bipolar patients, in real-time, with the help of wearables. “The world doesn’t get better just because,” she says. “AI might be a powerful technology, but things won’t get better simply by adding AI.”
“You can’t just collect data, you have to build intelligence on it,” says Chris O’Connor, GM of IBM Watson IoT. He believes that the terms ‘AI‘ and ‘IoT‘ will eventually become synonymous. “There are maybe only 10 players globally who are currently able to aggregate this information and build value.”
Jeroen Tas, CEO of Connected Health at Philips, says that AI was an inevitability in the field of healthcare: it is the only reliable means of studying the “diversity and complexity” of medical data, of recognising patterns too subtle for human detection, and of tracking digital pathology. As Ming puts it: “Who wants to get a worse diagnosis of their cancer, just to keep a human doctor in the job?”
Are the robots here to take your job?
“There is no element of the work hierarchy where you shouldn’t expect to see displacement,” says Ming, citing recent McKinsey research which suggests that as much as 40 per cent of a CEO‘s job can be automated. “I don’t think anyone currently owns that problem,” she adds.
This is happening right now; earlier this month, a Japanese insurance firm replaced 34 of its employees with IBM Watson. So how do we avoid our own obsolescence? By making AI a complementary technology, Ming suggests, rather than a displacing one: “How do we augment people? How do we create technology that’s complementary to what we do?”
Ming also points out the need to acknowledge that while in many sectors, automation is going to free people up to do different and better kinds of work, “that simply isn’t true for the global population… there are people doing these jobs who won’t be able to move up the training scale.”
“We need mechanisms to deal with the short-term displacement that is going to be a fact,” says Accenture CTO Paul Daugherty, pointing to tools such as VR which can be used to augment human capability. “Technology can help solve this problem,” he says, adding: “Public-private sector collaboration is going to be crucial to this.”
Daugherty is the author of a recent Techonomy article which outlined the four key challenges that humanity needs to work on in order to coexist productively with AI.
