Is AI going to take my job?

“Will AI take my job?” This is one of the most asked questions on the internet. Before answering this question we have to understand what AI actually is and how it works and the history of technological innovations in general. Then it will help us to understand if there is any worry.

As its name suggests artificial intelligence is intelligence like humans has but it is created artificially. Before the age of AI, computers didn’t have their own intelligence. Programmers had to program manually for every permutation and combination of a task. They couldn’t do it on their own, so something like face recognition was impossible because every face has its own characteristics and programmers would have to write code to recognize every face individually. But now with the help of advanced mathematics and the increased computational power of computers, it is possible.

AI is nothing but another technological innovation like TV or mobile phone or the internet. It is the history of every technical innovation that when it is in its baby steps it creates a lot of buzz and a lot of skepticism. Like with the TV everybody said that it’s an idiot box and it will kill radio but radio is still alive and with the internet, people said it will destroy the world but here we are, our online lives have become as important as our offline lives.

It’s our history, whenever there is a groundbreaking change in our society, we adapt to it. The moral of this short history lesson is that the same will happen with AI.

As AI is an intelligent machine, there is one thing machines are very good at and that’s doing repetitive tasks more faster and accurately than human beings. So there are some jobs that are bound to change like factory workers on an assembly line or receptionists at a desk of the office, jobs like these will be done by a robot with AI. And that’s inevitable. Now if you are doing a job which consists of repetitive tasks, then it will be replaced by AI sooner or later.

There are some jobs that will not be replaced by an AI or not at least in the near future. Jobs that require human creativity or human emotion or imagination or any other human ability that nature has only given us. Jobs like writers, psychiatrists, scientists, lawyers, HR managers, or the same people who created AI, the software developers.

Now what’s the solution, if your job lies in nonreplaceable jobs then you don’t have to worry but if it is on the first list you have some options. If you are in the very early stage of your career you can always shift your job but if you are in later stage of your career, there is a history lesson in this regard. All those people who lost their job to automation just didn’t become unemployed. The nature of their job changed. Factory workers who worked on manual packaging lost their job to assembly line machines. They changed their job from packaging to operating those same machines, bank tailors whose job was taken by ATMs found new jobs in the same banks.

So the answer to the million-dollar question “Is AI going to take my job?” is “NO”. You will not be unemployed just the nature of your job will change.