The effects that artificial intelligence and robotics will have on employments will likely result in the creation of a major employment crisis that may become one of the worst crises of the twenty-first century. It was originally predicted that “poor” jobs, such as stock clerks and warehouse workers, would be targeted hardest by AI. Those predictions as to the extent of job losses caused by them remain, but what is now emerging as a threat is that which AI poses to ‘high end’ jobs such as financial analysts and computer programmers as the Wall Street Journal notes.
Artificial intelligence—programming machines to think more like humans—is expected to alter how Americans work on a scale similar to the impact of robotics and desktop computers. But employees affected by it are much more likely to be in management or professional roles than laborers turning screws or filing papers.
The most vulnerable occupations include marketing specialists, financial advisers and computer programmers—jobs that tend to pay high wages and skew toward male, white and Asian workers, a recent study from the Brookings Institution found.
Other jobs most vulnerable to being affected by AI included certain types of engineers, optometrists, graphic designers, software developers and sales managers. (source)
There has been note of a potentially dystopian future where human employees are forced to serve an AI boss or manager. While this would be touted in the name of “efficiency”, there is something very dehumanizing about being forced to listen to and be judged on one’s performance by a machine that has no soul, for even the worst of bosses is capable of changing his behavior because he is a human being. A machine however is just a machine- it is programmed to do a task and it has no soul.
There has already been a serious “personalization” of society through smartphones and the isolation of people from each other. The creation of robot ‘bosses’ would just be an extension of this.
As far as the actual state of high-paying jobs goes, it would only increase the wealth of a very elite minority while taking away more from the poor, creating a large and wandering class of people with no work and generally living in poverty and without a hope for the future. Such is not only destructive of society and communities, but with lots of young men especially with no direction, like the refugee crisis, it creates the conditions for a body of people willing to enlist in the armed forces for a war, and as the shadow of a major global war approaches, such a “timing” of event could not be more “perfect.”
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