When you listen to people talk about AI, there’s one thing that worries many of them:
young asian woman use digital tablet on virtual visual screen at night
“Will this take our jobs?
It’s an understandable concern, because there’s one within each of us that depends on it for things like grocery money and health care.
So it’s a major problem if AI ends up eliminating many of the jobs that Americans do every day!
MIT Deep Learning Course
To get some insight, I interviewed a few dozen MIT undergraduates with industry experience from an MIT Deep Learning course I’m connected with. I asked them:
“When will intelligent AI robots produce the majority of the world’s work? 1-2 years, 3-5 years, 6-10 years, 10+ years or never? (or no strong opinion)?
Here’s what they had to say:
The majority of our respondents said it will be 10 years or more before AI actually begins to take over much of the common work that humans are now accustomed to.
A few said it would take one to three years, and a few said change would likely be within three to five years. One respondent said that A.I. Never take over in the way we envision.
Others had more nuanced responses…
“The majority of software developers will not be replaced entirely by AI, but by senior engineers using AI to become 10-100 times more efficient, completely eliminating the need for junior developers,” one student wrote, focusing specifically on this labor pool. “In addition, more people will be able to create software solutions through natural language interfaces and simply have a conversation with AI, iterate on it, and give it feedback in real time.”
Another of our respondents, an entrepreneur with experience in AI research, said:
MIT Deep Learning Course
“The work of red, white and blue collars will be completely reorganized in various ways, and the work will shift from red and blue to more white collars, but they will never exceed 51%, (since) this would also inadvertently mean unemployment. astronomical, which would paralyze the world economy as a whole… just because we can automate it doesn’t mean it can solve it on its own.”
“Within 1-3 years, AI robots will impact many of our industries,” writes another. “However, the job market will not be disrupted any sooner by AI robots. The reason is this: improvements in mechanical engineering are not yet there to create general-purpose AI robots to replace our workforce… Moreover, everywhere in the world, human labor still costs much cheaper than heavy investments in AI technology, to perform low-cost tasks. cost low-labor manual jobs in countries like China and India. At least for the next 20 to 30 years, blue-collar jobs will dominate the world for general less-skilled labor requirements.
So basically a lot of our experts don’t see this happening at lightning speed. And they see it happening in pieces, over a longer period of time. There are also many indicators that jobs are not going to disappear, but simply change. We watched some presentations like Factories on the Frontier, where factory workers talk about how they use robots in industrial environments. What we hear all the time is that humans end up taking jobs handling machines. People don’t just dump the machines in a facility and fire every person. There are many jobs in maintenance and monitoring, not to mention sales and inventory management produced by these fantastic AI entities.
So don’t be too scared when you hear about AI coming for your job. But know that AI is increasingly capable of doing more and more every year, in a whole new type of economy and in the uncharted waters of a high-tech culture.