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At the dawn of Artificial Intelligence (AI) era

AI today is the equivalent of the early days of automation

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Arun Krishnan
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Earlier this week I attended an interesting session on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and computing organised by Microsoft. The highlight of the session was the conversation between Nandan Nilekani and Satya Nadella, where the Microsoft CEO mentioned that his top three focus areas for the future would be cloud and AI, Agents (bots) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Augmented Reality (AR). The session had a number of very interesting demos that utilised Microsoft's cognitive toolkit to address real world issues. While the indiscriminate use of the term AI did distress me, I was heartened to hear Satya Nadella caution everyone to be realistic about AI and its applicability.

We are at the dawn of a new age right now, somewhat akin to what people must have felt when the industrial revolution started. The promise of AI is akin to the promise of the automated assembly line that pioneers like Henry Ford were putting together. The term AI is being used to cover a wide variety of predictive tools (truth be told, even a linear regression has predictive capabilities). Computer scientists tend to talk about the Turing test (after the great mathematician Alan Turing) when talking about true AI capabilities. A machine is said to have passed the Turing test if it could fool a human into believing that he/she is interacting with another human by using replies to questions put to both. I tend to think of AI in a slightly different manner. Just as automation helped to remove the burden of repetitive physical chores from human beings, AI has the power to remove the burden of repetitive mental processes and chores from human beings.

Obviously, automation in the early 21st century including robotics is very different from its simpler cousin in the early 20th century. AI today is the equivalent of the early days of automation. What is interesting though is that technology currently available is still powerful enough to automate quite a few of the mental processes across job types. Let us take the role of a Compensation and Benefits Lead (C&BL) in an organisation for example. Her main task is to map the skill sets required for specific roles and the compensation commanded by those skill sets to those existing in the market. She does this by looking at industry-specific data and identifies compensation bands for specific roles and finally comes up a mapping of roles to pay bands for her organisation. Current technologies are capable enough in automating most of these mental processes.

Should the C&BL be worried about her job? Should we all? While it is fair to assume that as time goes on, AI capabilities will improve to the point that apart from intuition, most analytical problems can be solved by computers, I also believe that AI will bring along new jobs, just as the industrial revolution while automating some tasks, gave an opportunity for humans to upskill and learn new jobs.

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