![](\"https:\/\/blogsmedia.lse.ac.uk\/blogs.dir\/99\/files\/2019\/06\/Robot-takeover.jpg\")
<\/p>\nIf you\u2019re one of the many who see a dark future where the honest working man is replaced by mindless structures of automated metal, where technology has become so advanced that it is no longer under our control, and where the human race is overpowered by evil robots programmed to take over the world, 1) I envy your imagination, and 2) you should probably stop listening to people like Elon Musk. Musk, arguably one of the most highly revered tech-minds of our time, told the National Governors Association in July 2017, \u00a8There certainly will be job disruption. Because what\u2019s going to happen is robots will be able to do everything better than us. \u2026 I mean all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u00a0image<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0Qniksefat<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n In 2013 James Barrat, filmmaker and author of\u00a0Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era\u00a0<\/em>(*insert eye roll*) even told the Washington Post he knew an alarming number of highly respected AI industry insiders who actually have their own off-the-grid safe houses in the case of robot-takeover. Now if that doesn\u2019t scream sensationalism, we don\u2019t know what does.<\/p>\n We get it, it\u2019s easy to fall into the doomsday trap, especially if you don\u2019t have any working knowledge of AI and are listening to the, let\u2019s call them\u00a0media-friendly,\u00a0<\/em>celebrities above. But if you\u2019re willing to spend a little bit of time digging into AI and what it can and cannot do, you\u2019ll quickly discover AI\u2019s actual impact on society. And the forecast isn\u2019t so bleak.<\/p>\n Does AI pose a threat to our societal and economic development? Yes. The more and more we inch towards implementing AI in a broader spectrum of roles, be it in business, government, or society, the more we must take into account the responsibility the creators of these intelligent models (humans) have when developing and training them. Machines are unable to think, and they cannot solve problems on their own. It\u2019s the creators of these models that build the criteria to which the model responds, learns from, and adapts to. We need to shift our perceptions of AI from an autonomous source of knowledge to that of a simple, even dumb, computational assistant. That being said, if there\u2019s any risk of a global crisis, the finger should be pointed at dumb humans, not machines.<\/p>\n When we discuss the possibility of economic downturn, it\u2019s naive to believe that machines are the perpetrators of this scenario. Let\u2019s go back to Elon Musk\u2019s previous comment on job disruption. Since AI became tech\u2019s latest buzzword, dozens of studies and surveys have estimated the negative impact on employment around the world. One\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0even predicted up to 47 per cent of jobs in the United States could be automated within the next 20 years.<\/p>\n Although we can\u2019t negate the possibility of the studies, we have to take it all into context (and maybe with a little grain of salt.) Sure, there\u2019s no denying that certain repetitive jobs may be lost to automation, but there\u2019s a plethora of others that can be created as a result. We\u2019re already seeing a serious increase in demand for data scientists as technology evolves. Coders, AI researchers, AI scientists and other deep tech field operatives will see an abundance of opportunity.<\/p>\n And as for the jobs not lost to machines, they will without doubt be enhanced and improved. Remember when MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) came onto the scene? Many university professors and academics turned a cold shoulder to the growing trend, convinced that it was the beginning of the end of their teaching careers. On the contrary, professors from all around the globe are seeing otherwise. Online courses aren\u2019t only giving hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people around the globe an opportunity to access free education, they\u2019re giving educators the digital tools to make their work more effective. These courses aren\u2019t eliminating educators, they are enhancing them.<\/p>\n Speaking at the 2019 National Retail Federation\u2019s Big Show, Brian Cornell, CEO of Target, said \u201cTechnology is going to disrupt the future of work, perhaps sooner than we thought. We are exploring everything from AI to VR, but we see no substitute to our stores and our employees. We focus on building talent and personal service.\u201d Similarly, the previous year at Oracle OpenWorld 2018 Oracle CEO Mark Hurd commented, \u201cThis is not going to be fewer people in IT. I frankly believe there will actually be more people in IT, but more people in IT working on a different set of tasks\u2026Everyone needs a boss, including bots.\u201d<\/p>\n So what\u2019s the point of the story here? AI is not something to be feared. It\u2019s not an impending robot revolution. It\u2019s not an economic tidal wave rushing to wipe out jobs and create large-scale unemployment. What it\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0is another technological disruption, and just like any other technological disruption of the past, it is bound to cause some shock waves. These changes, however, are not something to be feared, but embraced. They are a means to socio-economic progression. AI has the potential to create jobs, enhance our daily lives, and even jumpstart economies. But in order for that to happen, we need to stop treating it as the villain in some low-budget sci-fi horror film.<\/p>\n Co-author: Terence Tse,\u00a0<\/b>a co-founder of Nexus FrontierTech.<\/em><\/p>\n This article was originally published on LSE Business Review<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you\u2019re one of the many who see a dark future where the honest working man is replaced by mindless structures of automated metal, where technology has become so advanced that it is no longer under our control, and where the human race is overpowered by evil robots programmed to take over the world, 1)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":3370,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[183],"tags":[97],"ppma_author":[3305],"class_list":["post-1833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai-ml","tag-artificial-intelligence"],"authors":[{"term_id":3305,"user_id":599,"is_guest":0,"slug":"mark-esposito","display_name":"Mark Esposito","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g","user_url":"","last_name":"Esposito","first_name":"Mark","job_title":"","description":"Mark Esposito<\/a>, Ph.D, is Professor, Bestselling Author & Pioneer in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and Co-Founder of Nexus FrontierTech. He is a Professor at Hult International Business School, a faculty member at Harvard University since 2011, and a fellow at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He is the co-author of the best seller Understanding How the Future Unfolds: Using DRIVE to Harness the Power of Today's Megatrends. In 2019, his book on AI, The AI Republic, became #1 bestseller. He has been appointed as a global expert for the Fourth Industrial Revolution at World Economic Forum."}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1833"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28960,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833\/revisions\/28960"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1833"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=1833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}