Kristina Joshevska

Artificial Intelligence and Job Creation Artificial Intelligence seems to be a really controversial discussion topic these days, especially when job creation is involved with it. Some people believe that AI will kill more jobs than it will create, ​some believe the opposite. We all have different opinions and no opinion is right or wrong when it comes to AI and job creation because we can never be sure about anything in the future. Automated technology is undoubtedly ​faster and more efficient and if we look at it as a positive thing we can see the benefits it provides for us. ​In medicine, for example, AI can help in accurately diagnosing diseases which takes years of medical training ​and can also help in developing drugs faster and cheaper​. “​Leading biopharmaceutical companies believe a solution is at hand. Pfizer is using IBM Watson, a system that uses machine learning, to power its search for immuno-oncology drugs. Sanofi has signed a deal to use UK start-up Exscientia’s artificial-intelligence (AI) platform to hunt for metabolic-disease therapies, and Roche subsidiary Genentech is using an AI system from GNS Healthcare in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to help drive the multinational company’s search for cancer treatments”​ ​(Nature.com, 2018)​. AI will most likely benefit both the patients and the doctors. Even though automated machines are clever, I think it’s not so common for automation to completely eliminate a job. ​Humans and human interaction are always necessary ​to make sure everything goes the right way. Machines can replace certain work we do but they ​don’t have our psychological traits and our human intuition ​which in my opinion play a huge role in a working environment. Image source Even if automation takes over the majority of the jobs in the future, I believe that other changes in our lives will occur along the way. We are ​made to adapt to the changes that happen around us. We as humans and everything around us won’t remain the same while the automation takes over. If, for example, all repetitive jobs are to be automated, new ​more complicated jobs will rise up ​that will probably require learning new things and will probably bring humanity to an even more advanced level than before. Think about the emergence of the computers and the internet. Those inventions today help us enormously in finding jobs and give us​ access to limitless information​ among many other things. Image source Our future jobs will certainly be surrounded with technology of all kinds so we will have to ​develop other sets of skills aside from the ones that we have now. Maybe in the future ​we will learn programming languages along with human languages in order to communicate with our automated machines. Even nowadays there are very young children who get immersed in programming. One such example is Muhammad Hamza Shahzad, a 7-year-old kid who, as one Microsoft spokesperson points out, “​can explain about heap, stack, memory management, data structures perhaps better than many experienced programmers”​ ​(Lockley, 2016)​. Learning new things and evolving isn’t a bad thing. Everything is in our hands and we are the ones that control our lives, our work, our relationships etc. We sure have to be careful when approaching AI and the things that come with it but taking into consideration the way we evolve, I believe that we can handle the “mess” we ourselves make and invent. Image source We shouldn’t be scared of change and we should believe in ourselves. We should be positive and optimistic about our future and look at artificial intelligence as our assistant rather than our enemy. References: 1. Nature.com. (2018). ​How artificial intelligence is changing drug discovery​. [online] Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/d--x [Accessed 30 Jul. 2018]. 2. Lockley, M. (2016, September 08). Child genius who is tipped to become the next Bill Gates. Retrieved from https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/child-genius-becomesworlds-youngest-