Stephen Hawking, remembered as the most ground-breaking scientist of our age, once said: “I fear that artificial intelligence may replace humans altogether” (as cited in Medeiros, 2017). And he was not alone. In fact, a study by Kaspersky (2019) found that 60 per cent of the UK population are concerned their jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence (AI) in the near future. While it is understandable that implementing new technology into businesses can cause concern among workers, the fear of job loss due to AI is unfounded.
According to the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report (2020), AI will replace 85 million jobs by 2025. On the flip side, the same report states that AI will create 97 million jobs by the same year. Hence, while AI will continue to change the way we work, it may not cause massive unemployment but instead create more jobs than it replaces.
As the adoption of AI is skyrocketing in every industry (McKendrick, 2021), many repetitive and sometimes dangerous tasks are being automated. 15 senior-level tech executives who comprise the Forbes Technology Council (2022) predicted a number of jobs that requires copying, pasting, transcribing, and typing to be totally automated within the next decade, including insurance underwriting, research and data entry, and accounting.
Furthermore, the executives predicted that within that same timeframe, warehouse and manufacturing jobs will be totally automated, to improve process efficiency while keeping employees out of harm’s way. As automation is able to impact almost all activities, from inventory management to stocking of shelves, fewer and fewer humans are required. Hence, these jobs are threatened by AI.
Although AI will cause job losses, it will also create jobs elsewhere. In the New World of Work podcast, Richard Cooper, Professor of International Economics at Harvard University, said technology has historically tended to create more jobs than it replaces (as cited in McKinsey & Company, 2018):
Technology has been changing for at least seven centuries. It reached a new stage with the Industrial Revolution, starting in the 19th century. And roughly once a generation, we have a near panic by some people because technology is destroying jobs. And it’s true that new technology often destroys existing jobs, but it also creates many new possibilities through several different channels.
The technology of AI as a vital and fundamental part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is no exception. Sean Chou, CEO of AI start-up Catalytic, said that AI requires data preparation and maintenance, training, and monitoring (as cited in Thomas, 2022). It also requires exception handling to make sure that the AI is not running amok. As every industry is adopting AI, the demand for these skills is indeed going to skyrocket.
Unfortunately, the fear of automation overshadows the benefit of AI augmentation where people and AI are combined to complement each other. Gartner (2017) predicted that in less- and nonroutine work AI is “more likely to assist humans than replace them as combinations of humans and machines will perform more effectively than either human experts or AI-driven machines working alone will.”
AI augmentation will indeed increase the productivity of anyone who can apply it to their job, which, as a result, will reduce the labour costs. Entrepreneur, author, and speaker Byron Reese (2018) says that companies are responding to cost savings by spending their saved money elsewhere, which creates new jobs in those areas. Hence, many fields of work will not experience job growth in spite of AI, but through it.
Although implementing AI has some great benefits, it lacks skills in three fundamental areas: imagination and creativity, strategic or critical thinking, and emotional intelligence. These skill areas are unique to humans and will not be replaced by AI. Therefore, jobs that require one or more of these skill areas will not be replaced by AI.
The first skill area that will not be replaced by AI is imagination and creativity. Basically, AI is pre-defined algorithms constructed to solve complex problems with existing data (Arora, 2019). Although the billion-step algorithms are advanced and may be self-learning, they are still confined to work within a limited and pre-defined dataset (SG Analytics, 2021). AI cannot yet perform beyond its function nor imagine beyond its programming, not even in the foreseeable future.
Unlike AI, humans can function under various settings. We are able to understand the complex causes of a problem, to work from experience, and to navigate complications and obstacles (Miah, 2019). In addition, we can analyse and adopt creative tactics to unexpected, uncertain situations (Tandur, 2022).
As AI cannot think beyond its pre-defined solution area, it is not able to form a completely new and original idea. Creativity, defined as the capacity for connecting two different ideas, is unique to human beings (SG Analytics, 2021). Humans are born to think outside the box, and our creative minds allow us to form ideas that do not currently exist (Yancey-Siegel, 2017).
Rupali Kaul, Operations Head at Marching Sheep, said AI “cannot replace creativity which is spontaneous and requires imagination, dreaming and collective inspiration – something humans are best at” (as cited in Sharma, 2022). Human creativity will indeed continue to be needed not only in investment or entrepreneur jobs, but in all jobs that require a high degree of creativity. Hence, imagination and creativity will not be replaced by AI.
The second skill area that will not be replaced by AI is strategic or critical thinking. Although AI can help implement tasks, it cannot provide a strategy for the business that makes each task relevant (Sharma, 2022). Unlike AI, humans can evaluate their available sources, their level of expertise, their challenges, and their internal strengths and weaknesses to design a business strategy (Arora, 2019). Regardless of industry, these roles will always be done by humans.
In a technology-enabled future, critical thinking as a skill is mandatory for two primary reasons (SG Analytics, 2021). Firstly, critical thinking is fundamental to know causes from correlations in data trends. It will be more difficult to identify differences as datasets become bigger and more complex. Critical thinking will enable us to reverse AI decisions. Secondly, critical thinking is fundamental to regulate laws concerning AI, and to determine the cross-functional impact of AI.
As mentioned, humans are born to think outside the box. There are many thousands of marginally different possible outcomes that may result from every single action. Humans are able to judge from experience which outcome is most likely to come about for each action, and which is least (Miah, 2019). As AI cannot achieve strategic or critical thinking, these skills will not be replaced by AI.
The third skill area that will not be replaced by AI is emotional intelligence. Although AI is accurate, it is neither intuitive nor culturally sensitive (Tandur, 2022). And although its algorithms are accurately programmed to perform a task, they are not even close to achieving human intellect.
However, humans can read into the situation, and our emotional intellect makes us able to understand and handle an interaction that needs emotional communication. Even the most advanced AI will never be able to fully understand nor respond to our feelings like a human can (Sharma, 2022). The ability to understand how others feel, known as empathy, is unique to humans and will never be replaced by AI.
Empathy is fundamental at every workplace. As a professional relationship derives from the personal affinity between an employee and an organisation, employees need a personal connection to each other in order to build trust (Tandur, 2022). The ability to empathise with others is a skill required at a workplace to manage emotions, work in teams, and communicate effectively (Yancey-Siegel, 2017).
In fact, empathy is not just about what you communicate, but also how. Your tone of voice and your body language are as important as your choice of words (SG Analytics, 2021). Can you imagine a robot informing a patient of her cancer diagnosis? Overall, empathy will always be a relevant and necessary skill in every job that involves building relationships with colleagues, customers, clients, or patients. This fundamental skill will not be replaced by AI.
Conflict resolution and negotiation are related skills that will not be replaced by AI, as many conflicts are based on or involve emotions (Yancey-Siegel, 2017). Furthermore, either side in a conflict may proceed irrationally or may have hidden motives. Unlike AI, we are able to reason out the true intensions of an argument and to judge when to push or concede (Miah, 2019). As these skills are unique to humans, they will not be replaced by AI.
Overall, jobs that require imagination and creativity, strategic or critical thinking, or emotional intelligence will always be performed by human beings as AI is likely to never achieve those skills. Although these jobs may be assisted by AI in some way, they will never be completely replaced.
For instance, humans will always be needed in teaching. Shuna Khoo, PhD, who is Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Singapore Management University, explained to me the importance of human educators: “Teaching is not just about equipping the students with knowledge in different subject areas, but also helping them to learn and develop the soft skills. An AI is not capable of that”.
Already in elementary school, students get to learn about different soft skills such as self-control, kindness, and sharing, Khoo says. These are all emotional intelligence and empathy skills developed through the human interaction between educator and student. Furthermore, their interaction fosters critical thinking in students, which is vital in a post-truth world. Although AI can be a valuable tool for basic knowledge learning, it will never replace the importance of human interaction.
There will also be a continual need for human workers in the healthcare industry, according to Khoo. Although surgical procedures can be aided by AI, only a human doctor is able to decide whether a surgery is needed or not. These are complex and crucial decisions as any error can have serious and lifelong consequences for the patients. “The AI can inform, but the final decisions must always be made by human doctors,” Khoo says.
Furthermore, there will always be a demand for psychotherapists in a society suffering from mental health disorders. “A psychotherapist has to be an active and empathetic listener, and encourage the client to open up. She also needs to know what to say and what not to say to the client,” Khoo says. “An AI, however, is not able to read between the lines literally, to look at the emotions, and to judge from the client’s personality whether whatever the client is saying means something else or not.”
In his article, AI-expert, author, and former Google China President Dr. Kai-Fu Lee (2018) listed 10 professions that will always need human workers, based on his 38 years of work in AI research, products, business, and investment. For example, there will always be a need for human scientists: “Science is the ultimate profession of human creativity. AI can only optimize based on goals set by human creativity. While AI is not likely to replace scientists, AI would make great tools for scientists,” Lee wrote.
He mentioned the advantages of adopting AI in drug discovery: “AI can be used to hypothesize and test possible uses of known drugs for diseases, or filter possible new drugs for scientists to consider.” However, the algorithms cannot make predictions without a given dataset prepared by the scientists. Although AI is indeed going to transform scientific research, the need for human scientists will still remain.
Stephen Hawking feared that AI may replace humans altogether, but AI is rather going to amplify humans. The technology of AI will indeed create more job opportunities globally, as every other technology introduction has proven historically. However, on an individual level, the biggest threat is not about the fear of job loss due to AI, but rather the ability to adapt to change.
References
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- Lee, K.-F. (2018, October 1). 10 Jobs That Are Safe in an AI World. Medium.
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- Reese, B. (2018, November 6). Artificial Intelligence Will Be the Greatest Jobs Engine the World Has Ever Seen. Entrepreneur.
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- Sharma S. (2022, July 5). Skills or jobs that will not be replaced by Automation, Artificial Intelligence in the future. The Economic Times.
- Tandur, V. J. (2022, June 10). Four skills that won’t be replaced by Artificial Intelligence in the future. The Economic Times.
- Thomas, M. (2022, October 17). Robots and AI Taking Over Jobs: What to Know About the Future of Jobs. BuiltIn.
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- Yancey-Siegel, W. (2017, June 23). 6 Skills That Won’t Be Replaced by Artificial Intelligence. Open Colleges.
