The World Economic Forum has estimated that artificial intelligence could displace up to 75 million workers worldwide by 2022.

Now, that's a lot of jobs that could be disappearing. To put it in perspective, that's about half the entire American workforce being affected over the next 1 (one) years.

We've come a long way since 1997 when supercomputer Deep blue beat human champion Garry Kasparov at the crucial game of chess. So, with all this rapid progress, just how long is it before robots could take over our jobs?

Humans have been working harmoniously alongside machinery for many years, for example, the heavy-duty machines that we used to help us build cars or manufacture food, these machines solve problems and complete cognitive tasks, albeit any of which humans can do however it's important to remember robots are simply the hardware once Artificial Intelligence has been added to a machine we then get a robot with autonomous capabilities.

But what exactly did machine robots like this start to become more than just moving parts?

When did AI begin to infiltrate our everyday lives, and how has it grown so exponentially over the past decade?

By definition American inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil stated in 1990, AI is the art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people.

We're now interacting with AI on a daily basis, it's capable of anything from ordering lunch through an app on your smartphone to predict what you'd like to watch on YouTube, to what songs you should be listening to on repeat.

Of course, being worried about the imminent uprising and mechanical robots has been a common sci-fi plotline in Hollywood for decades, but the relationship between humans and intelligent machines is much less scary than films like Terminator would have us believe. If we're looking at the progress of AI, Narrow AI remains the only form of intelligence humans have managed to create successfully, which is the programming of computers to be great at one specific thing, as yet robots can't display sentience, feelings, or emotions. Computers with emotion would theoretically see Artificial General Intelligence or the more human level computers such as C-3PO or wall-E, which contain as much intelligence as well we do.

The next level up would be Strong AI and these are the robots that many fear will take over the world, but let's just leave that part out for now.

Let's instead take a quick history lesson, it all started in 1943 when young prodigy, Walter Pitts and his fellow scientist Warren McCulloch both pioneers of cybernetics are said to have sat down or a glass of their favorite whiskey and decided to apply their precise knowledge of neurons and brain functions to mathematics, now we're going to get a little complex here. Walter and Warren's work was based on a simplified process of neuron nerve cells that are adapted to carry electrical impulses from one place to another in the brain. They showed that each neuron is a simple digital processor making the brain, as a whole, a form of a computing machine. These create the basis of human thought, and thus their ideas would go on to create the first mechanistic theory of the mind, based on the first computational approach to neuroscience. In layman's terms, this means they had shown that the brain computes and that mental activity is simply the processing of information, and doing the very thing they had explored, they demonstrated how a machine could, in theory, compute. Between them, they had instigated the pillars of artificial intelligence.

Their research fundamentally impacted psychologists Frank Rosenblatt and later Google Scholar Geoffrey Hinton to take AI from a radical idea to the impactful technology that surrounds and informs our everyday lives today. Think about this 77% of us are now using AI-powered devices or services while technologies like self-driving cars are set to be worth an estimated 54.23 (fifty-four point two-three) billion dollars in 2019 and this is likely to rise. It appears we're on the cusp of an AI revolution, like the digital and industrial revolutions before it, the AI revolution will certainly be accompanied by layers of upheaval and change, particularly in the job sector. So, let's jump in and explore some jobs that are currently being completed by AI in everyday roles.

 

Healthcare:

Introducing AI in the medical profession is proven particularly useful in the field of imaging, meaning whenever you get a scan be it MRI, mammogram, or X-ray a healthcare professional has to physically look at the picture to determine if there's anything out of place. This can be a time-consuming process and not always very accurate. The introduction of AI has allowed millions of records to be reviewed in a shorter amount of time, 30 times faster than the human doctor. AI also functions at 99% accuracy, which you sing the need for unnecessary biopsies and allowing physicians to assess more accurately a patient's risk of cancer. Diagnosing patients is also improving thanks to AI such as Watson. Watson can review and store the mass amount of medical information, simply put every medical journal symptom and case study of treatment and response around the world and at a rate which is exponentially faster than any human, sorry Sherlock. In 2016, Watson diagnosed a patient with a rare type of leukemia in which the bone marrow makes too few healthy blood cells. By cross-referencing the patient's genetic data with its own database, Watson detected over a thousand genetic mutations in the patient's DNA. More importantly, the supercomputer could filter out which of the thousand were diagnostically important, Watson was able to do the work which would have taken a human doctor, weeks to figure out.

 

Literature:

The shaping landscape of the art of literature has been centuries in the making, marked by the greats Shakespeare, Austen Hemingway, rolling or Dickens. However, the automatic narration is now emerging as a new field of research, in which Robo writers are set to replace traditional journalists, using algorithms that produce readable journalistic stories or so they'd have you believe. Companies have been putting it to the test for a few years and you may have heard of the utterly bonkers Harry Potter fan fiction script which was published in 2017 by a machine called Botnick, entitled Harry Potter and the portrait, of what looked like a large pile of ash, it's definitely worth a read. In other news, the journalism industry has seen widespread movement into working with AI one such robot named Heliograph, clearly do the short store with their name, currently employed by the Washington Post and enables the newspaper to publish very specific content, instead of writing for a big audience the AI can target many small audiences with a huge number of automated stories about a niche or local topics relevant to that human. One Chinese lab has even gone a step further by creating a 3d humanoid robot journalist Jia Jia, this Robo reporter can exit the lab conduct interviews take pictures, and even write the story without any human involvement. In 2019  a fully written novel has been published by AI. However, we've got a long way to go before the next Lord of the Flies is penned by our robotic counterparts, but of fairness, they're probably still light-years ahead of the Infinite Monkey theorem.

 

Legal System:

 2016 saw the introduction of the first AI lawyer called Ross. Ross is able to look up obscure court cases instantly and provide relevant advice to the case at hand, as well as replacing human lawyers Ross could also help provide cheaper legal assistance for those who can't afford to shell out for the most expensive defenders, assuming you could track him down, he'll be there for you. In theory, using AI lawyers like Ross would allow law firms to charge lower fees since they wouldn't be paying humans who generally prefer to get paid for their work to handle the clients' cases.

 

 

Creativity:

 It isn't just pragmatic professions that are at the mercy of AI, even human creativity has been boiled down to a formula which can be taught. Creativity is the ability to come up with new and valuable ideas and one way to do this is to combine familiar concepts in unfamiliar ways, if given a rich store of knowledge to learn from AI can do just that to create art, produce music even create new recipes based on food chemistry and flavor profiles. Sam Jin, a researcher at the Stanford AI lab, commented on the fact that Google's alpha zero programs beat stockfish, the world's leading chess engine in 2017, not by learning from human behaviors but by playing against itself thousands and thousands of times. He says no computer would be able to invent Mozart or do anything creative but when you look at alpha zero, it's bordering on creativity, it's bordering on intuition. For example, in the music industry one first AI and human collaboration was brought together on Terrence Southern's album, I am AI which was written composed and produced solely by a machine, so who's to say in the coming years we might be listening to more robotically engineered tracks on the commute home, and lastly on a topic of-the-art world in 2018 the first AI artwork portrait of Edmund Bellamy was sold at Christie's for four hundred and thirty-two thousand dollars, which is an indication that there is definitely a market for these kinds of things. Albeit creativity should be subjective,

 

The Verdict:

it's hard to imagine a profession that will not be impacted by the advancement of artificial intelligence the late Stephen Hogan was vocal on exercising caution when it came to creating AGI machines as they could into and be able to replicate themselves potentially leading to a robotic uprising, sounds Carolee familiar.

There is a huge debate as to when this technology could be achieved, but if robots do take our jobs how will we survive and that is in and of itself another big question.

Do you think this will happen in the near future and what do you think will help us get through this AI revolution.

 

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