Artificial Intelligence issues
A few days ago, I received an email where a student wrote: “I am worried If artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking over people's job. What will happen next? Do people just enjoy life? Please advise.”
Answer: Although artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing many things, it cannot replace people yet. Today the application of AI to robotics and automation have become a common thing in many factories, but they still need people to control and monitor automation activities. Many newspapers warned that within ten years, over fifty percent of works done by human will be done by robots and many people will lose jobs. But few people would pay attention to another news that the number of workers who employ at factories that build robots has risen to 200,000 in 2015 and will rise even further to about half million in the next few years. One manager explained: “Robots can do a lot of works but cannot build another robot, they cannot reproduce themselves. There is high demand for people with robotics knowledge who can design and build robots. Today Robotics engineering is a “hot field” with very high demand.”
According to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, Nissan Motor company had use robots for decades, but investment in automation has led to more jobs, not less. Car assembly in Japan is now a mixture of people and robots working side by side where robots do the heavy works, and workers control robots using computers. Nissan has invested millions of dollars into new assembly lines that use robots, but they also have to hire additional people to manage these robots. A Japanese manager explained: “We re-train assembly workers from using their muscles to use their brains.”
Some optimistic people believe that advancing in robotics technology would allow more leisure time for people, but it is just “wishful thinking” because there will be more works, more issues to solved and more things to do as the society get more complicated and the world will get more competitive. Automation is changing many works, but it also requires new workers with advanced knowledge and skills which mean people will have to be retrained for the new jobs. However, as the world of the future will not be the same, there will be wider gaps between the skilled workers and unskilled workers, the highly educated and the lesser educated, and between those with and without jobs.
These are issues that will need to be solved NOW before it creates disaster to countries that cannot keep up. Advances in technology will push more and more companies to automate instead of using labor workers because robots can bring in much higher profit for them. It is important for people to understand this trend and take proper actions to acquire new knowledge, or learning new skills so they can remain employed. Especially students who are still learning the old way of memorization to pass tests but not paying attention to acquire new skills. Without proper education, they will be left behind and suffer the consequence of unemployed with no future.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
