Artificial Intelligence and the New Workplace

AI technology is and will continue to be a major disruptor in the workplace and jobs. In January 2016, the World Economic Forum released a report predicting AI, machine learning, and other nascent technologies will spur a so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” that replaces 5.1 million jobs by 2020. According to the report, jobs across every industry and every geographical region in 15 of the world’s largest economies — Australia, Brazil, Germany, China, Japan, the UK and the US, among others — will be affected. Six jobs are eliminated for every robot introduced into the workforce, a new study says.

In 2013, Oxford University researchers In a published paper titled: “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerization” C.B. Frey and M.A. Osborne, researchers at Oxford University, created a model that calculates the probability of substituting a worker in a given sector. Frey and Osborne conclude machines may replace 47% of active workers in the future. Of 1,896 prominent scientists, analysts, and engineers questioned in a recent Pew survey on the future of jobs, 48% of them said the AI revolution will be a permanent job killer on a vast scale. The Bank of England has warned that within the coming decades as many as 80 million jobs in the U.S. could be replaced by robots.

A team of researchers led by Katja Grace of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute surveyed several hundred machine-learning experts to get their educated guess. The researchers used the responses to calculate the median number of years it would take for AI to reach key milestones in human capabilities. Overall, the respondents believe there is a 50% chance that AI beats humans at all tasks in 45 years and will automate all human jobs within 120 years. Experts believe artificial intelligence will be better than humans at all tasks within 45 years, according to a new report.

One of the surprises of AI in the last 50 years is that people thought we would start by automating the trivial things, like construction work or cleaning toilets and the hardest things would be what doctors and lawyers do. It actually turns out to be exactly the opposite. Doctors and lawyers are much easier to automate than street sweepers.

Obviously, the major question we must answer is what will people do if large numbers of jobs are taken by Artificial Intelligence programs or robots? Millions of white-collar workers could now be at risk according to politicians and business leaders meeting at the World Economic Forum. In his book, Rise of the Robots, Martin Ford describes the social and economic disruption that is likely to result when educated workers can no longer find employment.

Futurist Jeremy Rifkin contends we are entirely a new phase in history, one characterized by a steady and inevitable decline of jobs. He says the world of work is being polarized into two forces: One, an information elite that controls the global economy; and the other, a growing number of displaced workers.