AI+EI AND THE FUTURE OF WORK

AI+EI AND THE FUTURE OF WORK

 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, at the height of the first industrial revolution, a movement emerged in England composed mainly of artisans who opposed the technological development of industrialization. Considering that the automation of work resulting from the new technology would displace the labor force leaving several thousand workers out of work, the Luddites, as they were known, burned and destroyed machinery and factories throughout the country as a form of protest. years of these events, once again the threat of automation looms over the workforce? 

 Nowadays in the XXI century, computers can perform any function even beyond simple automation. Thanks to the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial evolution (EI), computers can become highly competitive with humans in terms of their ability to innovate, design and create new solutions that no human being has ever thought of . In just 5 years, thanks to AI + EI, the development of Deep Learning has allowed computers to perform tasks as complex as image recognition, ie distinguishing people, animals or things, as well as describing the actions performed by people or animals that can appear in pictures or in real time video format, making it possible for computers to understand the environment that surrounds them and what happens around them. 

 In order to develop autonomous computers, it was essential that they acquire the ability to create by themselves solutions to the problems that arise. It was the main limitation in the development of this technology, but it is here that the artificial evolution makes its game, since thanks to its algorithms, the computer can devise several possible solutions and select among them the most efficient and starting from the latter, develop future progress. An amazing example of this is the NASA St5 project. In which computer scientists programmed some computers with algorithms of artificial evolution and these designed several transmission antennas that when tested by NASA proved to be much more efficient than those designed by the antenna engineers. This was the first technology designed by non-humans that has been sent into space. Therefore, we have AI to allow computers to detect problems while IE allows computers to find a solution to these problems autonomously.  

 In 2012 Wallstret employed 150,000 people, while three years later the automation had reduced that number to 100,000. Estimates predict that by 2020 approximately 20 million autonomous cars will circulate around the world. In its January 2017 report, Mackinsey & Company estimates that more than 2,000 work activities in 800 professions for which $ 15 billion are paid worldwide can be automated with the technology currently proven. It also estimates that the activities most susceptible to automation are predictable physical activities and those related to data collection and processing, which in U.S.A. represent 51% of economic activities and almost $ 2.7 trillion in wages. Even though activities requiring low-skill and low-wage are the most likely to be automated, even high-wage activities such as financial managers, physician and senior executives, including CEOs, contain a significant proportion of work that could be automated. 

 As a result of the first industrial revolution and the wave of work automation that it brought with it, new needs arose whose complexity demanded the emergence of professions and trades and the creation of hundreds of thousands of diverse works that did not exist before. The world economic forum estimates that 33% of current jobs by 2020 have not yet been created. Faced with such uncertainty, it seems evident that the future of the work will be concentrated in those areas where humans preserve their competitiveness over computers. 

 According to data from the Linkedin portal during 2016 the main skills sought by employers were: software development 35%, IT infrastructure 30%, big data analysis 15%, digital marketing 15%, economics and low 8%, electronics 5% the three main ones are related to computers science and are susceptible to automation. It seems that managing these skills will remain to be fundamental for all those who wish to achieve labor success. However, will be essential exploit all your creativity to develop business areas that, using this technology wave as a platform, can take advantage of the new economic complexity and as in previous times make the most of the circumstances.