With artificial intelligence and automation threatening the global workforce, playing an even bigger role in revolutionizing industries such as information technology (IT), finance, marketing, customer service, healthcare, legal, manufacturing, and many more, ADMARP President, Stanislaus Martins has urged marketers to stay up-to-date on the latest developments and consider how they can use AI ethically and effectively in their work as the technology becomes more prevalent.
A recent study from McKinsey revealed that by 2030, intelligent agents and robots could replace up to 30 percent of the world’s current human labor.
“While AI has the potential to revolutionize marketing as we see it in Nigeria, it also presents its own set of challenges for marketers as it puts many of our jobs at risk,” the President revealed.
In addition, these AI technologies will also displace between 400 and 800 million jobs by 2030, requiring as many as 375 million people to switch job categories entirely.
Besides unemployment, as machines begin to replace human workers in a variety of industries, some of the potential downsides of AI also include, inequality, security risks, and other ethical concerns.
As the widespread adoption of AI technologies continues to prevail, Citrix guru, Nicolas Ignoto believes it is also important to remember that while AI can automate certain tasks, it is ultimately controlled and used by people.
He shared in a post: “It is important to focus on how we can use AI ethically and effectively, rather than worrying about being used by it.”
AI is a fast-evolving technology with great potential to make workers more productive, to make firms more efficient, and to spur innovations in new products and services. At the same time, AI can also be used to automate existing jobs. According to a joint study carried out by the EU and US on the impact of artificial intelligence on the future of workforces, AI has the potential to streamline tasks across many industries, from health care to manufacturing.
For example, in health care, AI can be used to automate the tasks of sorting through medical images to diagnose conditions. In manufacturing, AI can be used to automate the tasks of quality control and inspection. By automating these tasks, AI has the potential to free up workers’ time so that they can focus on higher-level tasks. In addition, AI has the potential to improve the accuracy of these tasks, as well as to identify tasks that are most suitable for automation, the report shared.
AI has the potential to fundamentally change the relationship between automation technology, labor demand, and inequality. While studies have so far examined digital technologies such as computers and industrial robots, AI overturns the assumption that technology can accomplish only routine tasks. AI can be used to infer tacit relationships that cannot be fully specified by underlying software, because AI learns to perform these tasks inductively by training on examples instead of by following explicit rules that are programmable.
Meanwhile, consequently, many non-routine tasks done in both low-paid and high-paid occupations that cannot be performed by computers could be performed by AI in the future, with very different implications for labor demand, job polarization, and inequality.
