AI and Jobs: How is AI affecting the world of work?

We and AI: Investigating the Invisible

In this episode, Kevin and Peju explore the way artificial intelligence is changing the world of work.

We’ve all seen the headlines promising mass unemployment due to AI — but how realistic are these concerns? How will AI impact who is hired and who isn’t? And what does the future workplace look like when our colleagues are algorithms?

Join us as we put these questions (and many more) to our experts, Deepak Paramanand and Jeff Wellstead.

Deepak is Product Lead at Hitachi Europe, and former Senior Product Manager at Microsoft.

Jeff Wellstead has had an incredible 25-year career as a HR leader, helping organisations across investment banking, consulting and technology prepare for rapid growth.

Together, they’ll share their insight on AI and jobs, so you can work out the questions you need to be asking about this crucial topic.

If you enjoy this episode, make sure to rate, review and subscribe, so you can join us on the next stage of our journey to investigate the invisible.

References:

The news headlines mentioned in this episode are:

• ‘Bank of England economist warns thousands of UK jobs at risk from robots and AI’ published in the Independent, Monday 20th August 2018
• Job Loss From AI? There's More To Fear!, Forbes.com Aug 7, 2018
• A.I. and Unemployment: Which Cities Face Biggest Impact, Dice.com November 21, 2019

Notes on the Amazon case study

The software was created by a team at Amazon’s Edinburgh office in 2014 as a way to automatically sort through CVs and select the most ‘talented’ applicants.

But the algorithm taught itself to favour male candidates over female ones

The problem seemed to have been caused by bad data. The system was trained on data submitted by applicants over a 10-year period – most of which came from men.

It was started in 2014 and scrapped by Amazon in 2015 — so five years ago rather than 6 as Kevin said.

You can find out more about the Amazon here: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight-idUSKCN1MK08G

21 jobs of the future

The article we were talking about was the ‘21 HR jobs of the future’ published in August 2020 in the Harvard Business Review

Authors are Rob Brown from the Cognizant Center for the Future of Work and Jeanne Mesiter who is the Managing Partner of Future Workplace — both organisations that deal in predicting the future of jobs.

Find the article here: https://www.cognizant.com/whitepapers/21-jobs-of-the-future-a-guide-to-getting-and-staying-employed-over-the-next-10-years-codex3049.pdf

McKinsey study

Kevin mentions a Mckinsey study, Skill shift: Automation and the future of the workforce

For more information about the issues discussed in this episode, take a look at our blog post on: https://weandai.org/blog/