Artificial intelligence will create new kinds of work

Digital workers classify e-mail queries from consumers, for instance, by content, sentiment and other criteria. But consumers and companies will also expect ever-smarter AI services: digital assistants such as Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana will have to answer more complex questions. Accordingly, Ms Gray and Siddharth Suri, her collaborator at Microsoft Research, see services such as UpWork and Mechanical Turk as early signs of things to come. The printing press created new work for the wood engravers in Augsburg, but they quickly discovered that it had become much more repetitive.