How AI Anxiety Is Creating More Jobs For Humans

When the Facebook founder and CEO let it be known recently that the social network was doubling the number of people working on digital security and content review to 20,000, it was easy to interpret the move as a singular act of damage control by a company in deep trouble. But the way Accenture's Paul Daugherty and Jim Wilson look at it, Facebook's hiring spree is reflective of a much bigger trend unfolding across the economy: a boom in jobs meant to ensure that systems of artificial intelligence are in step with legal and regulatory obligations, ethical responsibilities, and community standards. "Facebook is a good example of a company where its technical capabilities got out of ahead of its ethical capabilities," says Wilson, Accenture's managing director of information technology and business research and co-author with Daugherty of the new book Human Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI. "Now they're playing catch-up." Many other companies, Wilson and Daugherty believe, are in the same spot--or will be soon. "We're at a tipping point," says Daugherty, Accenture's chief technology and innovation officer.