There’s always a lot of talk about how AI will steal all our jobs and how machines will bring about the collapse of employment as we know it. It’s certainly hard to blame people for worrying with all the negative press around the issue.
But the reality is that AI is completely dependent on humans, and it appears as if it will stay that way for the foreseeable future. In fact, as AI grows as an industry and machine learning becomes more widely used, this will actually create a whole host of new jobs for people.
Let’s take a look at some of the roles humans currently play in the AI industry and the kind of jobs that will continue to be important in the future.
Software Developers
Without software developers and engineers, AI wouldn’t exist at all. These people lay the framework for intelligent machines and keep them running smoothly.
It’s a tough job, requiring a solid understanding of programming and AI, among many other skills, but it’s a crucial part of the process. As well as getting the software up and running, there’s a demand for engineers to test it, maintain it and look for ways to improve it.
As AI becomes a more prominent part of our lives, the need for skilled developers will only increase.
Dealing With Data
Data mining is the process of gathering large amounts of data and making it into something useful. It’s a key part of many different industries, and in AI it’s especially important.
These miners need to search for patterns in data, looking for possibilities that haven’t previously been considered. Machine learning rests on the ability of machines to analyze data and then make decisions or perform tasks on that basis.
As a result, humans with a strong knowledge of data analysis are a necessary part of building these machines and teaching them to perform the same kinds of tasks.
Besides complex, advanced work, there are also a fair amount of more basic jobs springing up. Workers will need to gather data and perform microtasks to keep AI running. For example, Google is appointing 10,000 of its staff to review and clean up YouTube content before it trains AI models to do the same.
Skilled and highly qualified engineers are important in AI, but the industry also leans heavily on people who can build high-quality datasets. Tasks like image classification and text sentiment analysis are still beyond the scope of what machines can do, so this is another area where humans have a part to play.
In fact, this is the most time-consuming part of the entire AI development process and takes up to 80% of all research and development time. These workers, often paid low wages by Western standards and located in developing countries, are a vital part of the process. AI just wouldn’t function without them.
Training Machines For Human Tasks
Training a machine to analyze data sets and perform mechanical tasks is one thing, but that’s only the beginning of what AI is capable. If we want our machines to behave like humans and do similar jobs in society, then we need to teach them that, too.
That’s why there’s a demand for people who can train machines to speak and act like humans. This involves transferring skills like empathy and compassion so machines can console us when we’re feeling down or offer advice at critical points in our lives.
If we want human-like AI, it’s a big job. We’ll always need people to make sure robots are not just intelligent but sentient.
Applying Machine Learning
There are lots of ways that AI and machine learning can be deployed, and we’ve really only scratched the surface so far. As time goes on, more and more fields will start using AI on a regular basis.
For this to work properly, we will need to apply machine learning to different areas that it wasn’t specifically created for. This will involve adapting the technology slightly and figuring out new uses for it.
If this can be done successfully, it will open the doors for a wide range of new applications for AI. It’ll require creative thinking, innovation and strong technical skills in a number of areas. In other words, it’ll require human beings.
The Ethics Of AI
AI raises a ton of ethical questions, as it has since well before people started actually working on it. Sci-Fi provides a pretty thick catalog of what-ifs -- things that could go wrong and ethical challenges for AI developers.
In the past, this was just speculation, but nowadays AI is quickly becoming something very real. The job of thinking about these issues and deciding how to factor them into current research is not a trivial task.
There’s an urgent need for people to think about the kinds of ethical frameworks we need to build around AI. What morals will we teach our robots? How do we avoid making AI machines that have the propensity to be racist or unknowingly commit heinous atrocities? You might ask a robot to bring about world peace, and it might do so by removing every human from existence.
There’s a lot of discussion about what we need to do in order for AI to progress. But the question of how we should do it is just as important, if not even more so. And that’s a question that only human beings can answer.
