Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work

If you've read anything about technology in the news recently you might be inclined to think that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to take over the world, leaving us mere mortals to find new ways to earn a crust. Indeed, the plethora of new services, even turning AI into its own service (AIaaS – AI as a Service), will start to redefine the way we communicate, work, and experience the world. Google's CEO Sundar Pichai has been bold enough to say "In the long run, we're evolving in computing from a'mobile-first' to an'AI-first' world".1The There's a lot that needs to happen before AI can automate entire professions, and we're seeing research that shows that jobs requiring human interaction (thankfully HR is one of these) will be the hardest to replace.2 As with any broad scale changes that affect people's livelihoods and the economies that we rely on for stability, views about the future impacts are many and varied.