Artificial Intelligence and the Growing Importance of Soft Skills -- #38

The AI-related stories landing in your Facebook and Twitter feeds are mostly about doomsday Artificial General Intelligence scenarios. While interesting, they distract from the more pressing issue at hand. AI-driven automation will create new jobs and help people to be more productive, but the painful truth is that AI-driven automation of both specific work activities and entire jobs will be incredibly disruptive to hundreds of millions of people around the globe. The McKinsey Global institute and The Obama Whitehouse, respectively, believe that "60% of all occupations have at least 30% of activities that are technically automate-able," and "47% of U.S. jobs are at risk of being replaced by AI technologies" over the next 10–20 years. When a company stands to gain enormous financial benefits from automating a certain work task, and said task is automate-able with current artificial intelligence techniques, you can expect for it to be automated quickly.