Humans and AI Should be Partners, Not Competitors

7 years ago | Posted in: Technology | 596 Views

Though science-fiction has feared that AIs would seek to exterminate us, it’s not all that dire. Instead, they’re taking our jobs. The impact is felt high and low, but even the base McDonald’s and Walmart employees are being driven out by automated systems. Humans have to step up their game against the AI or be replaced, right?

On the contrary, the much more effective approach is for humans and AIs to work together. Many successful companies are already adapting to this perspective, and results show they have a huge advantage over other businesses or industries that reject AIs altogether.

AIs aren’t replacing us. With the right tactics, they can augment us.

  1. AIs Are Making Us Better At Our Jobs

Let’s take marketing for example. Without AIs, an experienced or newbie marketer would have to rely on their gut instincts or vague past experience in order to do their job successfully, with several human errors. With AIs, marketers of every level can use real, actionable data to understand their playing field and possible variables in the future. AIs give us guidelines and structured results that can be built off of from a server computer. This is where our own creativity comes in; after we have our foundation. AIs are not only making our jobs more successful, they’re making us better at them.   

  1. AIs Are Eliminating Jobs – Only to Open Up Better Ones

Yes, McDonald’s employees will be out of work when customers can self-order. However, this automated process now frees up schedules to focus on more important tasks. Rather than putting their best minds on tedious tasks and paying them less simply because that’s the budget, corporations can now promote their employees to higher levels and then pay them a higher wage. They’re making the same profits as before, but with less meaningless human labor. That’s not to mention all the other avenues that can be branched off into with the added time, allowing businesses to create new jobs that weren’t conceived of before or weren’t possible without the efficiency of the AI.  

  1. AIs Are Creating Easier Jobs That Everyone Can Access

The higher level a job is, the more training it requires. In an effort to obtain better results and save time, this drives employers to hire only the most experienced workers – which does, of course, leave most manual labor workers in the dust. However, with AIs automating the processes and delivering accurate data, the “guess work” and therefore necessary education is cut out. You just need to interpret that information and use it. An AI will pull most of the weight, allowing for more unskilled labors to fill in gaps that AIs cannot. Now, rather than leaving the grunt workers behind, AIs are in fact making higher level jobs easier, allowing for people to scale up.  

  1. AIs Will Compensate for Underpaid Jobs

Teachers and caregivers are some of the most important workers in society, yet also some of the most underpaid. While AIs have not yet progressed to a level where they can replace humans in this position, that is coming in the future – meaning the elderly or disabled can still receive the care they need, while freeing up the workforce for other tasks. The jobs humans are hired for will pay more, giving them a better standard of living.

In the meantime, however, AIs are improving the sharing of information, such as medical data or teaching plans, making an aggregation of human knowledge more universal and therefore beneficial to people on the ground. AIs are augmenting a human’s ability to work, and therefore making the payment of these jobs fairer.

The key to a strong relationship between humans and AIs is communication and understanding. Not the same style as we would expect between us humans, but instead in the way we might understand a car. The more knowledgeable we are about how they actually work, what’s under their hoods, and what we expect from them, the better we can care for and modify them while also using their abilities to our greatest advantage. We can’t resist the influence of cars or lament how they put the Pony Express to even more shame than the train did. In the same way, we need to allow our AIs to augment us, rather than overwhelm us.

 

by:  Rick Delgado

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