Radio Interview: AI & The Future of Work

During a recent interview on CampusFM with Monique Chambers I explored the impact that Artificial Intelligence has on the jobs of tomorrow. We chatted about ‘disappearing professions’ and the changing expectations of customers. What is the role of education? How can we evaluate human cognitive skills? What is intelligence? How can a machine understand human language?

Some key concepts which emerge from the interview are:

1. Employability is less about what you already know and more about your capacity to learn and adapt.
2. AI will find it hard to negotiate complex social relationships or be creative. Thus the (human) jobs of tomorrow will need to be based on insight, wisdom and soft skills – rather than raw computation.
3. The Government of tomorrow is one that is trusted and that embeds privacy norms deeply into its public policy framework.
4. Change is rarely the problem. Resistance to change is. For companies, understanding the reason staff (or customers) resist change will become a critical competence. The advocacy necessary to help an organisation change its culture is (and will remain) much in need.
5. We need to take time to explain key technical concepts in AI as there’s so much hype which hides the tough questions (and realities) behind Artificial Intelligence.
6. Thinking is the ultimate cognitive activity (using our brain & mind to make sense of the world around us and decide how to respond to it). An alarming unintended consequence of technology evolution could be the the erosion of critical thinking.

The problem of living in the midst of this technology revolution is that it’s hard to take a long-term view of what’s happening. Technology is not an instrument; it is a way of ‘seeing’ the world. It helps reveal our understanding of the world, of ‘being’ human.  

^{Audio interview courtesy of CampusFM
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