FEATURE24 October 2018

The meeting of human and machine

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Tim Phillips

AI B2B Data analytics Features Impact Innovations North America Technology Trends UK

Artificial intelligence is increasingly used in the process end of market research, leading to horror stories of job losses. Rather than focusing on the fear, however, the industry can embrace the benefits, while honing the skills required to manage and interpret AI. By Tim Phillips.

AI-sp1-2

In August 2018, Andy Haldane, chief economist of the Bank of England, warned that artificial intelligence (AI) would make many of our jobs redundant. He speculated that the changes in the job market could be worse even than during the Industrial Revolution, causing mass redundancies in white-collar jobs.

“This is the dark side of technological revolutions, and that dark side has always been there, ” Haldane said. “That hollowing out is going to be, potentially, on a much greater scale in the future, when we have machines… replacing the cognitive and the technical skills of humans.”

As always when redundancies are announced, our first thought is: what happens to my job?

In 2016, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, of the University of Oxford, ranked all 702 statistically recorded occupations in order of the probability that they will be automated away. Ironically, they did this by training an AI to recognise the sort of activities that will be profitable for the ...