Tech visionary Elon Musk made headlines when he said recently that artificial intelligence is like \"summoning the demon\" and may well be humanity's \"biggest existential threat.\" Just this month, researchers in Japan announced they had created a software system that could outperform the average Japanese high school student on a standardized college entrance exam. In other words, the machines are catching up to humans in intelligence. <\/p>\n
Concerns about A.I. and robots can be divided into two broad categories and framed as questions. First, will the machines take our jobs and destroy our livelihoods? Second, do we have to worry that advanced artificial intelligence could truly threaten humanity, perhaps by acting to destroy us (as in the \"Terminator\" movies) or enslave us (as in the \"Matrix\" series). <\/p>\n
The evidence suggests that, at least for the foreseeable future, the impact on employment is what should worry us. <\/p>\n
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The reality is that most people in our workforce are employed in occupations that are on some level fundamentally routine and predicable. Most people come to work and, regardless of their job title or industry, tend to face the same basic types of challenges again and again. Just as a trainee might learn to do a job by carefully observing everything done by an experienced worker, rapidly improving machine learning algorithms seem likely to eventually figure out how to do a great many jobs. <\/p>\n
Last year, a team in Oxford University performed a detailed analysis of over 700 occupations in the United States. They came to the conclusion that jobs constituting a staggering 47% of U.S. employment---well over 60 million jobs---could become automated in a decade or two. <\/p>\n
It's important to realize that projections like these do not rely on the stuff of science fiction. Machine learning technology is already in widespread use; it powers Google's language translation service as well as its self-driving cars, the book and movie recommendations made on websites like Amazon and Netflix, and the potential matches suggested by online dating sites. <\/p>\n
The idea that smart software will eventually begin to eat any job that consists primarily of tasks that are predicable requires only a fairly simple extrapolation that technology will only get better and better. <\/p>\n
Many people remain very skeptical that progress will ever result in a significant unemployment problem. So far, history is on their side. The classic example of technological disruption is the mechanization of agriculture. In the United States, most people once worked on farms. Now the number is roughly 2% of the population. Millions of jobs were lost, and yet we are clearly better off; food is much cheaper and workers moved on to often more fulfilling jobs in other industries. The farm workers of yesteryear were able to transition into a rising manufacturing sector and later into service industries. <\/p>\n
But it may be overly optimistic to expect that scenario to play out again in the face of today's technology. Unlike the specialized, mechanical innovations that transformed agriculture, today's information technology is truly general purpose, and it will ultimately bring sophisticated artificial intelligence and robotics capability to every industry and employment sector. <\/p>\n
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