James Manyika on AI and the Impact on Jobs
Will innovations born of artificial intelligence come at the expense of people’s jobs? The answer is yes — and no.
Google’s Senior Vice President of Technology and Society, James Manyika, focuses on artificial intelligence (AI), the future of work and the digital economy, computing infrastructure, sustainability, and other areas with the potential for a broad impact on society.
Recently interviewed on Peter Kafka’s Recode Media podcast, James offered this response on finding the balance of tradeoff for discovering great new things with AI versus some jobs becoming redundant.
I think the impact of AI in work is a very important subject. One where I, together with others, not just at Google but in academia, have researched quite a bit.
I think if you look at most of the research on AI’s impact on work, if I were to summarize it in a set of phrases, I’d say its jobs gained, jobs lost, and jobs changed.
All three things will happen. Because there are some occupations where a number of the tasks involved in those occupations will probably decline. But there are also new occupations that will grow.
So, there’s going to be a whole set of jobs gained and created as a result of this incredible set of innovations.
But I think the bigger effect, quite frankly, is what most people will feel is the jobs change aspect of this. Where a lot of jobs will change, aspects of your job that you might have spent time on — you won’t spend as much time on. But it will also give you time to spend on other aspects of your job.
If you look up the next several decades, the net seems to be that there will be more jobs created than lost. That gives me comfort. But at the same time, there’s going to be a lot more that we need to do in terms of skills adaptation. How do people evolve their skills, and how do we all do that.
That’s where the real work is going to come in, how we rethink our skills and how we do our jobs now. What do jobs look like?
