He works with our accounts, makes monthly closing, collects information from our invoicing system, ERP and online payments and enters them to the accounting system. "I just hired a guy--his name is Mark II--to process insurance claims. He can also analyze the claims and make decisions. Both of them are obviously effective guys, but there is even something better. He doesn't just handle the routines and processes we had earlier, but we can redesign all our operations not only to save costs but multiply our sales.

Robots might be taking over the blue-collar jobs of less-educated Americans, but artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to shake up college-educated employees in higher paying jobs, leaving no worker immune to the impact of technology on the American workforce. "[AI] will be used more extensively by the most high-paid and many of the best-educated workers," says Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. "Automation has usually tended to affect lower-pay workers. AI is going to be highly prevalent in the middle class, white collar office. It was surprising to see how clearly that jumped out."

The revolutionary development in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and its dramatic consequences, is a global economic upheaval and one that will both provide opportunities for and challenge India dramatically. Discussing India's response to this global upheaval, Martin Wolf, associate editor and chief economics commentator, Financial Times, London, said, "India needs to devote careful thought to the domestic implications of the revolution in artificial intelligence." He explained, "As a country with a growing population and labour force and huge employment in services, the implications might be very radical, both creating and destroying opportunities on a massive scale." Wolf, who delivered the seventh NCAER CD Deshmukh Memorial Lecture 2019 in New Delhi on Tuesday, spoke on the theme of Challenges for India from the Global Economic Upheavals. The other upheavals he addressed were the rapid economic rise of Asia, the strategic rivalry between the US and China, growing protectionism in the US and the associated erosion of the liberal global economic order and the threat of climate change. Wolf, who has many times described India as a "premature superpower", summed up his arguments, saying that all these global upheavals will have profound implications for India as "they alter the environment in which it [India] hopes to develop, they demand substantial and far-sighted domestic responses and they will force it to clarify its global stance."

Artificial intelligence is all over the news, with tech titans arguing over whether it will be a force for good or bad. An equally important question is whether AI will stratify society even more, and create a world of haves and have nots. AI is already impacting multiple industries and will take over many blue collar and white collar jobs in the years to come. The speed and severity with which this happens are what creates the biggest challenges for the US and countries around the world. Add to this the geopolitical implications, recently outlined in an important op ed by Kai Fu Lee, and even weak AI can be seen as a scary thing.

Add to this the geopolitical implications, recently outlined in an important op-ed by Kai Fu Lee, and even weak AI can be seen as something scary. We need to be proactive and create alternative career paths for people as AI impacts jobs and takes away many employment opportunities. But as autonomous vehicles run by AI take over for taxi drivers (and make transportation more reliable and faster while opening up spaces currently occupied by parking garages) and robots with AI take over all but the most specialized work on factory floors (reducing production costs, which will hopefully translate into less-expensive goods), blue collar workers will have few alternatives positions to pivot to. Added to all of this are the foreign policy implications of AI, which Kai Fu Lee addresses insightfully in his recent piece.

Artificial intelligence is all over the news, with tech titans arguing over whether it will be a force for good or bad. An equally important question is whether AI will stratify society even more, and create a world of haves and have nots. AI is already impacting multiple industries and will take over many blue collar and white collar jobs in the years to come. The speed and severity with which this happens are what creates the biggest challenges for the US and countries around the world. Add to this the geopolitical implications, recently outlined in an important op ed by Kai Fu Lee, and even weak AI can be seen as a scary thing.