Intel AI boss: Europe is better prepared for automation job losses than US Europe is better equipped to cope with the seismic shift automation will unleash upon the global workforce than the US, […]

Europe is better equipped to cope with the seismic shift automation will unleash upon the global workforce than the US, Intel’s head of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has warned.

Workers in Europe have greater access to the education they may require to adjust to the significant changes robots, AI and other technologies will have bring to their industries than their US counterparts, according to the chipmaker’s vice president and general manager of AI, Naveen Rao.

Many industries are already making rational decisions about their long-term future and how employees will be duly affected, and certain roles will inevitably become redundant, Rao cautioned.

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“We’re seeing new demand created by industries that process data, and that has to be at the cost of some older skills. A company like Intel is big enough tohave an influence on the world, and we need to be thoughtful about such things,” he told i during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Rao joined Intel in 2016 after it acquired his own AI start-up Nervana Systems, and is heading up the company’s ambitions to create the go-to processors for AI deep learning – teaching machines to think like humans.

“We’re actually working with our government in how we can inform them, to say: ‘These are the things you need to start thinking about.’ Maybe we do need to think about retraining programmes, getting people access to education that allows them to be prepared for this shift. I actually, frankly, think Europe is much better at this than we are,” he said.

“The skills training is better in Europe than the US. We tend to have one or two paradigms that we go after: it has to be high school and college. I don’t think it’s quite so strict [in Europe], but we need to think about that, that the populus has access to the materials they need to be prepared for jobs that need to be filled.”

Around 800m people stand to lose their jobs to automation by 2030, while between 75m and 375m workers (up to 14 per cent of the global workforce) will be required to switch roles, a report from the McKinsey Global Institute found in November. Research from analyst Gartner suggests AI will start creating more jobs than it destroys by 2020, with around 2m entirely new job roles are expected to exist by 2025 in relation to wide-spread adoption of AI in the workplace.

The autonomous shift is already underway, at a rate “faster than a lot of people thought,” Rao said, adding that obvious ramifications on worker skill sets will be clear within five to 10 years.

While Europe may be ahead in terms of preparation for the much-prophesied robot uprising, it’s lagging behind when it comes to AI development, he cautioned – with the exception of England.

“It’s going to be very hard to beat China right now. The US and North America is probably ahead by a couple of years right now, but in five, eight years time, that’s not going to be the case, is my prediction,” he said, echoing comments made by former Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt. “I think there’s something going on there, that would be very difficult for the Western world to beat.”

“There’s a huge hunger in China right now for AI solutions, and they have a very nice environment where they can test things on a very large population. Start-ups there are a little different than in the US, they’re funded by the government and they have a test population of 50m users. I mean, how do you do that anywhere else?”

The rapid acceleration of AI development in China, which recently saw Google announce plans to open a new Beijing AI centre in an effort to snap up some of the country’s brightest minds, is formidable, he warned, although one English company in particular shines brighter than most – Cambridge start-up DeepMind, acquired by Google in 2014, and universally recognised as one of the world’s foremost AI companies.

“I do think that China’s going to be very formidable, and frankly, Europe is a little bit behind – England excepted, because of DeepMind. It’s become an epicentre there, and they’re attracting incredible talent from around the world. We’re going to see more of that happening, I think in China, there’s going to be a few DeepMinds. They’re going after it hard.”