MIT Explores What Impact AI Will Have On Work

As AI technologies have become more powerful in recent years there has been growing interest in how the technology will impact our work. The latest of these comes from one of the doyens of the field. MIT Sloan's Erik Brynjolfsson has recently penned a paper that attempts to provide a more nuanced exploration of the topic than the utopian and doomsday predictions that occupy either end of the spectrum. The paper argues that whole jobs are very unlikely to be disrupted or replaced by machines, with a much more likely scenario being that specific tasks will be replaced instead, although Brynjolfsson does concede that some jobs are likely to have more of their tasks automated than others. "Our findings suggest that a shift is needed in the debate about the effects of AI: away from the common focus on full automation of entire jobs and pervasive occupational replacement toward the redesign of jobs and reengineering of business practices," the authors say.