AI coworkers: Friend or foe?

In the first industrial revolution our physical powers, when we enabled the machines to move more material, build huge buildings, much faster and more efficiently than ever before.

With the second industrial revolution, steel, chemicals and electrification  we saw that machines were able to expend precise amounts of energy on everything from lighting a bulb to very large machinery and a  new wave of companies like the  U.S. Steel, General Electric, Standard Oil joined the stock markets along with ship and railroad companies. 

Then came the third industrial revolution when we taught machines to compute and interact with each other. And we all witnessed the transformation of the planet as the machines computed data that no human could in all the years of our existence and we shrunk the world to make everyone neighbours literally.

Now we are in the fourth era of the industrial revolution and production is already at its peak. The rate of innovation spurred on by ubiquity of information and availability of processing power is exponential. Now we are transferring to the machines the most sacred of our strengths, the one that brought us to the top of the food chain in a mere 10000 years! Our intelligence.

If we learn from precedent it is clear that here again the machines will compound data and the artificial neural network will become so powerful that we will look like newborn babies in the shadow of that intelligence.

And that is inevitable. As of this writing it is no longer a question of if that will happen but how fast it is happening. And when it does, when the AI Coworkers show up at our workplaces  will it be scary as many sci fi stories tell us or will it be better for humans and the planet as a whole?

If you are in Enterprise Tech this is a question you would have taken sides on and would be really keen to learn more about. The answer to this will determine how far your enterprise will go to deploy these AI Coworkers and stay relevant in the coming years.

There are various debates on this and it may take a couple of books to summarise the pros and cons. For now I will just touch upon how the AI coworker is currently working with humans in a few areas and if the human co worker will be threatened by its AI counterpart in the enterprise. I believe I am among the few people on the planet that can say with some authority on the matter as the company I co-founded with Sanjeev actually built the E42 platform on which enterprises are configuring a variety of AI co workers. 

The AI recruiters, AI analysts, AI HR execs, AI BD execs, AI inside sales managers, and other AI co workers deployed today are helping enterprises produce more, produce better with the same number of employees. The recruiters for eg are able to sift through many more resumes and applications and screen candidates by interviewing them before the selected few are brought before a human resource. This means that they can hire better and the best candidate for the job doesn’t fall through the process as they have a personalised interaction with the enterprise’s AI recruiter. Similarly the AI analyst reads through various unstructured data and prepares an analysis for the marketing or compliance or risk assessment team depending on what the AI is analysing and makes life easy for those humans. Ditto for all the other AI workers deployed. 

I know what you may be thinking… well if AI did all that much better what will happen to the jobs? Will we be out of jobs?  

To answer that question let’s go back to precedent. During all the 3 industrial revolutions the exact same question was asked. Will these massive earth movers take away our jobs or will the computers take away our jobs? The answer is also the same… Nope

All these revolutions actually created more jobs, many times over. And another beautiful fact is that humans moved up the value chain. They worked smarter and lived a better life compared to the folks in the previous era. A whole lot of more jobs will open up in building, configuring and managing the AI coworkers. And in training humans to train the machines, curate the data, and so on. So in conclusion there is no doubt that we humans will co work with AI, and it will be good for us as a species and also the enterprise to cater to all species we know with better products and services. 

Having said that, we would still need a better regulatory framework and ethical foundations to ensure that the AI coworkers don't carry our biases from our reptilian brain into their workplace! If we get those in place we can rest assured that these incorruptible, efficient and compliant workforce will herald us into a leisure filled prosperous future.

The article has been written by Animesh Samuel, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Light Information Systems