Will your job be replaced by AI?
Artificial Intelligence professionals – working 24/7 and at the speed of light.
At Universities and software companies around the world AI or artificial intelligence is being developed to replace or assist jobs that are currently being done by humans. Here are a few of the AI systems that are starting to become popular in their use. It is surprising and a bit confronting to see that software is now reaching human level intelligence when it comes to executing human jobs.
Doctors
IBM’s Watson AI is better at diagnosing cancer than human doctors. Watson is being taught how to understand and accumulate complicated peer-reviewed medical knowledge relating to oncology. Watson’s ingestion of more than 600,000 pieces of medical evidence, more than two million pages from medical journals and the further ability to search through up to 1.5 million patient records for further information gives it a breadth of knowledge no human doctor can match.
Hospital, clinics and individual doctors can rent time with Watson over the cloud. Watson can suggest a series of treatment within seconds or at most minutes.
Lawyers
The world’s first AI lawyer has been hired at a law firm. Ask ROSS (AI software) to look up an obscure court ruling from 13 years ago, and ROSS will not only search for the case in an instant — without contest or complaint — but it will offer opinions in plain language about the old ruling’s relevance to the case at hand.
“With ROSS,” Andrew Arruda, the CEO and co-founder of ROSS Intelligence, says, “lawyers can focus on advocating for their client and being creative rather than spending hours swimming though hundreds of links, reading through hundreds of pages of cases looking for the passages of law they need to do their job.”
Accountants
Smacc offers small and medium-sized enterprises a platform to digitise and automate accounting and financial processes. “Now you have all you need for liquidity planning and revenue/expense reports close to real-time in the tool w/o the need to input data yourself or wait for your external account to do it for you at month’s end,” says founder Uli Erxleben.
Writers and journalists
AI writers and journalists are producing text that can no longer be differentiated from human written works. Try this interactive quiz on The New York Times website. Can you tell whether the piece of text was written by human or computer? I bet you can’t.
Psychologists
Ellie the artificial intelligence psychologist diagnosing depression and PTSD. Image credit: Institute for Creative Technologies
In some cases it is easier for people to interact with a computer than it is to interact with other people. This might also be true for people with emotional injuries.
Ellie works with people suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Whilst speaking with a client, Ellie collects data on the client and can analyse response, tone, pauses, facial expressions and micro expressions. The AI has determined rules on physical expressions of emotions and this technique works.
In a series of studies Ellie is as good or in some cases even better than psychologists at diagnosing PTSD and depression. Humans can be fooled if someone is charming, looks composed or spins a good tale. Soldiers did not mind talking to Ellie and found it easy to open up to her because there was no judgement or reaction from Ellie’s eyes.
Music composers
Google’s AI “Project Magenta” has created its first piece of 90 seconds of a piano melody after being fed four notes.
The development of AI technology still has a long way to go. The software is not yet at human level, but it is getting close. Careers as doctors, lawyers and accountants can no longer be considered “safe jobs”. Can your job be automated by AI?
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