New Delhi: AI pioneer Andrew Ng said that artificial intelligence is unlikely to trigger a mass loss of jobs but will instead create new opportunities if workers reskill.
He urged students and professionals to focus on acquiring new skills rather than fearing being replaced by machines, Andrew Ng said at the NDTV World Summit.
Andrew called for education and training programmes to anticipate the manner in which work would evolve, rather than focus exclusively on the skills currently in demand.
The expert said that current AI systems are not yet capable of eliminating the vast majority of jobs and that the technology often makes workers more productive, allowing businesses to expand and hire more people. “There will be hope and it’s not nearly as bad as the hype says it will,” he said.
Many businesses have hyped up the AI job apocalypse to make themselves look larger than their true potential or to gain PR attention, adding that recent data suggested AI was creating more jobs than it was destroying.
Andrew cited software engineering as an example of how AI can reshape, and not cut employment. “Certainly, in the United States, the number of software engineer job postings is up because when we make software engineers much more productive, we want to hire a lot more of them,” he noted.
He predicted a similar pattern to follow in other sectors as AI tools become more widely adopted.
“We’re readying them not for the jobs of 2026 or even, heaven forbid, the jobs of 2024, but for the jobs of 2028 and beyond. So that’s the challenge ahead of us,” he said.
A recent paper from Daron Acemoglu, an economist and Institute Professor at MIT said that the current direction of artificial intelligence development risks amplifying inequalities and job losses unless industry shifts focus toward tools that complement workers.
He said the discussion around AI should move away from Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or speculative fears about artificial general intelligence toward practical policies that promote “pro worker” AI systems.
(IANS)
