“Development of full Artificial Intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” late scientist Stephen Hawking shared his views with BBC in 2014. However, his prophecy seems to be a failure if he was focusing on the job market. A study conducted by Gartner , reveals that more job opportunities will be created because of AI than destroyed. It further added, by 2020 over 1.8 million jobs will be lost but more than 2 million jobs will be created as well. Let’s understand with a simple example. When the introduction of ATM was in its nascent stage, many people thought it will affect job market terribly as it was automated teller machine but surprisingly there was no change in the human resource. Then why should it be any different for Artificial Intelligence (AI)? ATM machines helped the banking sector to reduce their processing costs which helped banks to open more new branches while creating more employment. And the same logic seems applicable here as well.

Emerging New Careers: The introduction of more than 200,000 jobs

Going back to 1993, when web browser ‘Mosaic’ was introduced with a phrase ‘surfing the web’, it was believed by many that this will result in fewer letters, newspapers, and eventually become a threat to many jobs. But in retrospect, there was an exponential increase in the job opportunities in the past years than ever. Many new kinds of organizations were formed that are now earning humongous profits and generating massive job opportunities every year. A research also suggested that AI would destroy over 7 million jobs in the UK, but it will also generate more than 200,000 jobs. The research vice president of Gartner, Svetlana Sicular, disclosed that “Many significant innovations in the past have been associated with a transition period of temporary job loss, followed by recovery, then business transformation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will likely follow this route.” AI certification will majorly boost jobs for video game programmers, robotics programmers, and machine learning researchers, data mining analysts, and software engineers. It will also help defence sector to invent smart weaponries.

Artificial Intelligence is seeing an “amazing renaissance.”- Jeff Bezos

At the Internet Association’s annual gala in May 2017, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos added his positive view to the AI and machine learning subject by expressing that we were in something of a “renaissance” and “golden age”. Meanwhile, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) forecasted that in the coming years scientific and technical sectors would see a 16% net increase while education sector will also develop by 6%. However, Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba Groups addressed that AI can result in “decades of pain”. According to some studies, transport and storage and public administration sectors possibly will see a decrease of 20% approximately. Also, operational jobs will see a downfall as retailers will certainly opt for AI-powered systems to identify, optimize, and automate labour repetitive tasks while receding labour costs. But according to some studies, new jobs will be created due to AI augmentation by generating $2.9 trillion in business value and saving 6.2 billion hours of work.

An Accenture 2018 report titled ‘Reworking the Revolution’, revealed that the AI powered applications when combined with human intelligence will increase the employment globally by 10% by the year 2020. Indeed, there will be some jobs that will see a downfall and according to BLS occupations like MRI operators, geological technicians, technical writers, accountants, forensic scientists, medical secretaries, and customer service representatives will not witness much development despite AI. But, according to the mentioned facts and statistics, the job market will gain occupations from such sources that we can’t even imagine today. On the whole, experts are divided between the future of human employment and careers given the speculations around AI overtaking human jobs and much more but the growing trends indicate towards one seed germinating into many more leaves and fruits. This puts our faith back in the progressive technology with a bright future and nothing as notorious as it is dreaded to be.