AI: CREATING JOBS TOMORROW THAT DON’T EXIST TODAY

Maysoon El-Ahmad on May, 2017

Historically, robots and machines have made our lives a lot better leading to significant improvements in our standard of living.
We are now on the cusp of the digital industrial revolution with artificial intelligence (AI) at its core – and some major disruptions are inevitable. Blue Collar jobs, for example, are at risk of extinction.
BCG predicts that the share of tasks performed by robots will rise from a global average of around 10% across all manufacturing industries today to around 25% by 2025 while a report by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia stated that 40% of Australian jobs could be replaced by technology by 2025.
While we should be concerned about the imminent changes to the future of work (with some already taking place), the AI revolution will also see the creation of many new jobs that look nothing like anything that exists today.
A recent global study identified the emergence of three categories of jobs, uniquely human jobs that are completely novel as AI takes hold.

TRAINERS: Individuals who teach AI systems how they should perform. These jobs could include anything from assisting with language translation to mimicking human behaviours, to empathy trainers who train digital assistants with sympathy.
EXPLAINERS: These jobs will clarify technical jargon, problems, and operations to businesses. As more and more companies deploy advanced AI systems they will need employees who can explain the inner workings of complex algorithms to nontechnical professionals.
SUSTAINERS: Ensures AI systems operate as designed and are making ethical decisions.

We believe the AI revolution will have one of the most profound implications on the job market in human history.
These changes will see many menial and process jobs of today disappear (most likely in the next 5 years) and the emergence of many new jobs to help us adapt to new technologies driven by AI.
We are already seeing companies advertising new jobs in the AI space with Amazon recently creating their first ever AI team.
We expect that the next 2 years will see a flurry of new AI jobs mainly in the science & engineering space coming out of technology companies, the government, and universities – such as avatar designers, voice developers, digital crime specialists, AI language interpreters & AI consultants.
Humans will be doing less repetitive work (taken over by machines), so we expect to see a rise in job satisfaction as work becomes more deliberate driven by more demand for creative skills, emotion, and deep thinking.