How do we compete with AI for jobs in the future?

In what is the debate of the century, I keep getting asked this question at conferences and meetings with potential students, job-seekers, and business owners. I wish the answer was simple, but like most things in life, nothing is truly binary. 

We must recognize that technology is dependent on numerous social components that come together, and the interactions between these components make up complicated systems. In the case of artificial intelligence, not only do the technical pieces have to fall in place but also adhere the social dynamics and heuristics that humans have created in the workplace. No matter how much deep learning, machine learning, or natural language processing an AI system is equipped with, there will still be a lot of subjectivity that makes it hard for AI to completely replace humans in the office. 

I do believe that AI can do some of the work a human can do in a faster, more efficient, manner, but I still don’t think AI assistants can do the job of communicating, collaborating, synthesizing, and making decisions the way a human can. What you’ll notice from my thoughts are that work and jobs are two different things here.

In order to compete with AI, we need to transcend rote work and differentiate in the realms of creativity and thoughtful analysis.

AI might be able to enter data in a spreadsheet, set up meetings, or research who your sales team should call up next, but these are set functions that don’t comprise the entire job. If you’re hired to do just mere functions, then there will be stiff competition from AI, and this is what will incentivize job seekers to develop skills that evolve beyond “push a button” roles in the workplace. 

I mentioned subjectivity and heuristics earlier. This is the ability to weigh qualitative factors like the opinions of colleagues and make crucial decisions that extrapolate beyond a set of data or given parameters. It requires social judgement and I would still trust a human with these responsibilities. In a sense, it might not be practical having completely autonomous AI in the workplace.

The idea that I can just set some intelligent system up and it does everything on it’s own without me ever having to intervene is really a myth. 

AI will be most effective if it is used to assist humans. The analogy I like to take is the Tesla Autopilot. It’s semi-autonomous but still requires human involvement and oversight. This has become a practical solution that was able to get to market early and benefit drivers. A completely autonomous car is much more difficult to develop, will take longer to get to market, and there will be numerous ethical, economic, and legislative implications that will impact it's success. We need human-AI collaboration to make sure things are being handled the way we want them to be. The last thing I would need as a business owner is to have an AI system go rogue and make decisions that I cannot retract.

We choose to introduce AI because of the benefits they yield for our business or home. Therefore, we need to decide to what extent these technologies should work and how much control they have. I still believe that humans will have to take responsibility for what these AI assistants do.

We are not going to get away with saying, "It’s not our fault, the system acted on it’s own." 

The world I'd like to see is where we don’t compete with AI for jobs. There are things we do better than AI and vice-versa. The fact that this is coming from a technologist like me who runs an AI company, might seem counterintuitive. Shouldn’t I be saying that AI will be 100% perfect and will do everything for us? 

While working with machine learning and natural language processes, I’ve had the opportunity to see the great potential and as well as the limitations of AI systems.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-do-we-compete-ai-jobs-thefuture-krish-ramineni?trk=hp-feed-article-title-channel-add