AI in the workplace

Computers are amazing: they can process vast amounts of data, at an astonishing speed, and they are getting smarter all the time. It is now decades since they showed their ability to do humdrum calculations such as finding a cube root. Now they can plan the quickest route to drive from A to B, avoiding traffic jams, and tell us our arrival time. They can predict pretty accurately how many cartons of milk a shop is likely to sell in two days’ time. They can recognise faces. They can steer a car through heavy traffic.

This exponential growth in computing power will not stop. Robots will become increasingly deft at performing tasks we currently see as the unique preserve of humans. They will become more and more skilled in interrogating patterns of behaviour by individuals and organisations and then suggesting better ways that tasks can be accomplished. Artificial intelligence (AI) will surround us even more than it does today. Within a couple of decades, the tech evangelists maintain, it will be able to replicate everything the human is capable of – from holding a genuinely stimulating conversation to choosing the right clothes for your day ahead.

Well, maybe. But let’s be clear about what AI can and cannot do. Its “intelligence” is essentially an ability to process and build upon what has gone before.  Machines are literally “trained” by exposing them to huge bodies of data –text, pictures, codified speech—that allow them to spot patterns and make predictions. This can lead to seemingly-creative outcomes (such as the famous Go! victory by a computer that involved a strategic gambit no human had ever attempted), but it’s a form of creativity that is confined within a narrow set of boundaries: it is about drawing an inference from past experience.

So how does all this relate to the future of work? It is already commonplace to use a rudimentary form of AI called Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for automating and speeding up many back-office activities, for example scouring thousands of documents to find relevant precedents in putting together a legal case. Increasingly, such work and a myriad of other tasks will be taken over by AI, and the humans who used to do them will be redundant.