While some experts predict AI will take all the jobs, others say technology creates more jobs than it destroys.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

February 6, 2017

1 Min Read
Can We Outrun the AI Job-Apocalypse?

Artificial intelligence (AI) still can't tell us whether AI will take all the jobs. AI can do a lot of things, but it still can't do that.

Economists and computer scientists have been warning for years that as artificial intelligence gets smarter, it will start to put big chunks of people out of work. Not just people who work with their hands, in factories and warehouses, but knowledge workers too. People with desk jobs.

AI helps find insights in warehouses of seemingly unrelated data. It searches legal documents for discovery. And it can even diagnose cancer. These are all things that, until recently, only human beings could do.

As AI learns to do more and more work, will there be any more work for humans to do?

This has policy-makers and journalists concerned. A cynic might say that it's because policy-makers and journalists are knowledge workers, and they're worried about their own jobs.

The question has us at Light Reading concerned too, so we decided to look into it. We talked to experts, read research papers and went back in history literally thousands of years, looking for precedents.

Find out more about what we learned here: Will AI Create More Jobs Than It Destroys?

— Mitch Wagner, Follow me on TwitterVisit my LinkedIn profile, Editor, Light Reading Enterprise Cloud

About the Author(s)

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

Subscribe and receive the latest news from the industry.
Join 62,000+ members. Yes it's completely free.

You May Also Like