Have you thought yet about how technological advances might affect your job or your industry going forward?
Those of us in jobs that do not rely so much on Artificial Intelligence hear about the subject in the news and here and there relating to a certain company, but often discussions are not based in much reality and people do not think about how things will be in the future.
Ben Lamm, serial tech entrepreneur and co-founder of Conversable, writes “There is a lot of debate right now about the impact AI will have on our lives. Many fear that jobs will be lost to machines and automation. Some fears are more existential, that AI will become some kind of super-intelligence that threatens mankind. And then there is the other extreme of the arguments that see AI as enabling some kind of utopian vision where we lead lives of leisure and creativity while machines do all the work.”
He goes on to call all of these ideas “ridiculous” and argues that AI will continue to automate many things that have bogged us humans down during the workday but AI will not actually replace our ability to do things.
The sheer evolution speed of digital technologies, information storage, and intelligent data analysis creates fear that the machines will overtake us, but in reality what is happening is that we are creating AI in order to increase our productivity.
In Mr. Lamm’s article, for example, he explains that “AI that is specifically trained to know [certain] information can deliver answers for employees with more accuracy, more speed, and even more discretion than any human.”
In this example, AI is not replacing our ability to look up information we need in our jobs. It instead is something to which we can delegate a ton of tedious tasking. As a result, not only are we able to focus more on the important tasks but we are able to access information from the AI system more quickly, all in all streamlining the productivity of the department or company.
Finally, Mr. Lamm makes a strong point about how “AI can potentially free us up from the mundane to be more creative in our lives, but AI won’t make us more creative. That takes work and dedication on our end.”
We can use AI as a tool for our success and improvement, but we will still need to be the ones who apply that improvement to our work and lives.
