Fear not machine learning skeptics, the world will not be filled with robots who plan to take over the world and human jobs. But, we would be deluding ourselves to say machine learning will not impact the workforce, said Bonsai’s Hammond.
Just like with other technologies, it’s impossible to go from work entirely done by humans to work entirely done by machines and robots, overnight, said Hammond. It’s a gradual process, and in the intervening time, humans will find that machine learning is actually providing a lot of support to today’s jobs.
To some extent, the hype that machine learning will take over jobs is “silly,” said Forrester’s Gualtieri. Some jobs of course are very narrow and manual, and these are positions that would benefit from machine learning technology. But in cases where careers require a great deal of creativity, there’s no way to build that into a machine, he said.
“It’s augmenting the abilities of the humans that are doing the work, and allowing them to do more and do it better as opposed to replicating them,” said Hammond. “That is almost always the path the technological progress follows.”
The bottom line is, machine learning will make humans more productive, especially with the rise of “personal assistants,” or systems that offload some of the manual, tedious work that humans get bogged down with.
Physicians might spend half their day on paperwork or manual tasks, but imagine a machine learning assistant that could do all of this work and explain the prognosis in 17 minutes, said Abrams. This would allow the doctor to spend more time doing what they need to do, like meeting with patients.
In the future, one of the things the industry will see is the focus on the emotional connection that people develop with machine learning assistants, said Abrams. He’s not referring to the chilling sci-fi scenarios depicted in movies like Ex Machina; he means building systems that don’t just understand the meaning of word, but the context of the word. The more these systems can understand our emotional state and our personality, the better partners they are going to be in helping us tackle the big and small problems of society, said Abrams.
“When I look down the road, I think that systems that understand people are going to be increasingly important,” said Abrams. “AI systems are here to work with us; not take over us.”
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