Americans worry machine learning and artificial intelligence are a threat to their livelihoods. But the global pandemic demonstrates these data technologies are essential to improving lives.
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A recent survey captured the job-loss anxiety. Thirty-seven per cent of workers aged 18 to 24 say new technology will eliminate their job by 2025. This fear climbs to 45 percent for workers of most ages in advertising and marketing. It’s 42 per cent in business support and logistics.
Studies of job loss from automation attended to more dramatic conclusions. An Oxford study predicted that “about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk.” The McKinsey Global Institute found 51 percent of work in the U.S. may be automated, accounting for $2.7 trillion in wages.
AI and data concerns
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These fears are valid. AI will threaten jobs and alter career paths. It is like the multitude of other digital innovations that have emerged in the forty years since the arrival of pcs. Professions like legal work and accounting have largely been sheltered from disruption in the past. But now an AI-driven “virtual lawyer” application runs on Amazon’s Alexa and is seen as “a real threat” to junior solicitors.
The breakdown of societal systems also destroys jobs. Three million-plus U.S. jobs were destroyed by Covid-19 in March. Tens of an incredible number of jobs disappeared during the 2008-2009 global financial meltdown. Both crises are rooted in failing to understand the risks inherent in complex systems. Understanding complex systems is what AI is beginning to do better than humans.
In the financial meltdown, there was failing among subprime mortgage brokers, credit-default-swap underwriters, and unqualified mortgage applicants. In the pandemic, problems showed on luxury cruise ships, in nursing facilities, and a crowded market with live animals.
Getting there
AI isn’t yet with the capacity of figuring out the wild variables that would have predicted the pandemic or global financial meltdown. But the technology is improving. It’s driving an evergrowing variety of increasingly complex and sophisticated applications.
Banks are now using AI to spot new money laundering patterns previously not known to human compliance officers. They’re searching for other ways to win the multi-trillion dollar global fight financial crime. The technology can also expose criminal networks. It will find malicious activity that humans alone can’t uncover.
Optimizing data
AI might not yet allow you to predicting or preventing job loss spinning out of the worldwide crash. But it can help with the worst of the Covid-19 crisis. Hospitals are facing an onslaught of patients. They can use AI to analyze electronic medical record data. This helps find a very good treatments for patients, and deliver better and effective care.
Amid volatility in the credit markets, financial institutions are utilizing AI to control their liquidity. They’re balancing opportunities to increase credit against operational and regulatory risks.
Machine learning
Machine learning, a subset of AI, enables users to process and draw meaning from complex data. Lots of data is highly resistant to other methods of analysis. Machine learning can drive models that don’t rely on historical data and cut through the mess. These models will give insights to the most urgent events. That includes the Covid-19 crisis and the economic fallout that has followed.
Machine learning and AI even promises to enhance the lives of people who live and work not even close to the realm of high technology. It can allow rural nurses to create better diagnoses. Farmers can decide which crops to plant. It can translate textbooks as well as provide an early warning that students may be in jeopardy of dropping out.
A future?
AI is vital. As the global populace grows and new challenges arise, humanity will need every available innovation to ensure a bright future. People are far from solving all of the world’s problems. So jobs will stay plentiful — assuming that we continue to embrace progress and not notice as a threat.
Credit: Google News
