Machine learning will change jobs: Impact on economy could surpass that of previous AI applications

So say Carnegie Mellon University's Tom Mitchell and MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson in a Policy Forum commentary to be published in the Dec. 22 edition of the journal Science. Mitchell, who founded the world's first Machine Learning Department at CMU, and Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy in the Sloan School of Management, describe 21 criteria to evaluate whether a task or a job is amenable to machine learning (ML). "Although the economic effects of ML are relatively limited today, and we are not facing the imminent'end of work' as is sometimes proclaimed, the implications for the economy and the workforce going forward are profound," they write. The skills people choose to develop and the investments businesses make will determine who thrives and who falters once ML is ingrained in everyday life, they argue. ML is one element of what is known as artificial intelligence.