Tuesday Thought: AI and the Future: Our Doom or Our Bloom?

Artificial Intelligence has been of great help to us, especially in many industries that need automation, prediction, and analytics in their systems.

It minimizes inefficient manpower, boosts efficiency in output, and provides outcomes that would be hard for humans to process given a finite number of time.

On a consumer level, we can say that AI has affected our own lifestyle, making it more convenient to do stuff in our lives, especially when we demand instant results with just a click of a button or a press on the touchscreen.

Chatbots, virtual assistants (Siri), AI-powered apps such as video and image auto-enhancers, virtual companions, etc… these are only some examples of how AI makes our work easier.

You might probably think that AI is the next best thing, the grandest invention of the century, with the points previously presented.

But somewhere down the road, there is also the reality that AI is taking over some human jobs, and, to an extent, our achievements.

When I heard about an AI-created painting winning in an art competition, I was curious how did it get to be chosen among other entries.

I saw the work and I agreed that it was indeed aesthetically pleasing to see, enticing some emotions when it is viewed.

But then a couple of thoughts crossed my mind: was it fair to its human competitors? Will it hurt the career of human artists?

Some commenters said that art committees should just make separate contests for AI-generated artworks.

I agree with the suggestion, but in the back of my head I then wondered: if AI-artwork is that good, would clients just seek a machine to produce art?

This isn’t just happening in the art industry. AI is also taking its baby steps to make machine-generated text content.

AI writing software can effortlessly string words into phrases, sentences, and paragraphs to make it intelligible and the subject at hand coherent.

Yes, it's now scary to think what would become of content writers who have co-dominated the freelance job scene.

AI replacing human jobs is indeed not an impossibility. But with the current flow of things, AI has already become part of our lives.

So how do we get around this dilemma of job loss, while harnessing the power and benefit of artificial intelligence?

Many think that having extra skills in computing and IT is necessary, or even compulsory, in the future.

Should there be businesses utilizing AI instead of people, the company would still need some kind of technician to maintain and repair the systems.

I think this is a great idea, but are all employees ready or willing to be trained in the code?

I think this add and shift in job skills must be embraced, should the future landscape of employment would become mostly automated and AI-powered.

What’s more is that when there’s emerging technology, more new jobs will be born, just like trend in different time periods.

Like driving jobs only emerging when vehicles were made. Or photographers only emerging when the camera was invented.

It might spell doom for would-be obsolete jobs, but it will spell bloom for newly made occupations.

What about you, what do you think of AI taking over our livelihood in the future?

Disclaimer: the article is for expositional and educational purposes only.

Thank you for reading. Have a great day! :-)