According to the WEF, artificial intelligence will result in the displacement of 92 million jobs, which implies a net growth of 78 million jobs, taking into account the 170 million that will be created in the next five years alone.
But why are these figures considerably less alarming than what appears in the news?
Despite how ‘magical’ and unambiguous artificial intelligence appears to be, it has several limitations that make it impossible to replace the vast majority of jobs.
AI lacks empathy, critical thinking and social skills
Artificial intelligence lacks precisely the main skills that characterise us as human beings. These characteristics are essential in professions that require human interaction, such as customer service, education, team management and leadership, or psychology.
Furthermore, AI is incapable of making moderately complex decisions or resolving unexpected situations without human intervention when ethical judgement or the interpretation of social nuances is required.
Without going any further, when situations arise that involve crashing or running over a pedestrian, autonomous cars are unable to make an ethical decision, which is why platforms such as ‘Moral Machine’ exist to train these AIs in complex ethical decision-making.
If it is incapable of making a complex decision when driving a car, how can we expect it to be capable of making relevant day-to-day decisions involving people within a company?
AI is not completely reliable or capable of being autonomous
Although artificial intelligence is capable of analysing huge amounts of data and generating predictions based on it, it is not error-free.
I’m sure that, like me, you have sometimes been given a result that was ‘made up’, incomplete or biased.
This depends greatly on the training the AI has received and can easily lead to incorrect, or at least unreliable, decisions, which is incompatible with any case study in a job.
AI speeds up work, but without replacing expert knowledge
In work such as that of a programmer, AI can speed up development by suggesting code and detecting errors, which is incredibly valuable.
However, if a person does not know how to program and only copies and pastes the suggestions of artificial intelligence, they will almost certainly encounter problems in maintenance, quality and security.
For this reason, as in other professions, it is essential that there is expert technical knowledge to develop, review, adapt and validate everything that AI has done.
AI is a tool that can greatly enhance technical and non-technical jobs, but under no circumstances does it replace them.
AI frees us from boring and repetitive tasks
The best use for AI is undoubtedly in repetitive tasks such as summarising and reporting.
In this case, it is especially useful when it involves summarising, shaping text and analysing large amounts of data, although we must naturally review all the content that is automated, for the same reasons explained above.
Furthermore, these jobs are always the least rewarding, and freeing us from most of them allows us to devote our time to more important tasks and be more efficient in our workday.
In my opinion, there is no doubt that this is the main advantage of using artificial intelligence tools.
Conclusion
AI can structure and analyse information very efficiently, but under no circumstances does it replace human reasoning, judgement and reasoning, especially in decisions that are not purely objective.
AI is not going to eliminate jobs, but it is going to transform the way tasks are performed.
The work of the future will be characterised by collaboration between people and machines, where AI will become a ‘work accelerator’, but at the same time it will depend on humans to make decisions and apply that knowledge.
Its biggest limitation is that it lacks everything that makes us human, and therefore it will always be condemned to a secondary role.
