Blog Post #7

Since the terminology, “AI”, or Artificial Intelligence had been spawned, we have being seeing the related topics on media and it has been said that the use of AI has been witnessed in many fields now, such as robotics, virtual assistance, SNS monitoring, and so on.

Although the technology probably can save a lot of money for corporations where the majority of their employees are doing tasks that can be easily automated, there are quite strong public opinion and concerns that human beings will be deprived of more and more work by AI in the future.

If we look back on the past, even simple computer programs replaced many tasks that were originally done by more than 1 person manually. When I was very young, I did a part-time job at an accounting firm. The owner sometimes took a trip down memory lane, and then shared her stories about the workplace in the past.

Nowadays, we take it for granted we have office software such as Excel, but at that time, the owner said all the tasks were literally done by hand (e.g. with paper and pencil, and a simple calculator), and one task often required more than one person to be completed. So, the owner used to hire more people — even if the average wage (inflation-adjusted) for each employee was not as high as the one a current employee is entitled to. The owner also said that was like “work sharing”.

Of course, we cannot idealize the past, getting high on nostalgia, but being in a society where more and more things get automated, then people may feel a sort of ostracized.

Although I cannot recall the source, I read a blog article written by a lawyer a couple of years ago. The lawyer insisted that, although nowadays many lawyers often depend on AI technologies for researches, only humans can wisely decide how to effectively use the found information, considering various situations for the ultimate users. Still there seem to be fields AI excels at (e.g. processing a lot of information and extracting only useful ones) and fields humans are good at (e.g. creatively using / combining the information). And I really wish AI can bring positive outcomes for our future.