Aritificial intelligence is widely used in our daily lives and at the enterprises to gain efficiencies. Based on recent reports, there is an increasing trend in which companies are replacing human workers with AI and automation. In this essay, I would like to discuss benefits and drawbacks of this trend and how as a society we can prepare ourselves.
AI is the talk of the town and there is lot of enthusiasm among businesses, everybody wants to evaluate how to AI can be applied to their product line to bring value. Most of the time company’s focus remains on reducing expenses which directly impacts human resources for example IT service incident management completely replaced with self serice AI applications resulting in mass layoffs. Companies should have a wholistic approach on how the decision impacts the society, because if there are mass layoffs accross industries and people are not able to keep with monthly mortgages, card payments etc. then there would total financial collapse. If balanced view is not considered soon it may result in civil war.
We are in similar situation as that of industry revolution where several manual assembly lines were replaced with automation causing severe disruption to the labor market. People slowly adapted to the situation and made tremendous progress. I would suggest societies should treat this as an opportunity, adapt ourselves, learn and develop new skills. If we remain rigid and do not read the warning signal timely then we would be obsolete.
I am in favor of the automation and technological advancements however companies main focus should be on the value addition of the product, services etc. and not reducing the man power. AIso as a society we will to adapt to the changes, learn new skills to stay relevent and grow ourselves with this new AI revolution.