Automation and Artificial Intelligence vs. Humans

I’ve been hearing a lot of different ideas being touted on LinkedIn. “AI is going to end humanity”, “Automation is going to kill jobs”, etc. This isn’t at all immediate, nor true. What we are up against, and why AI, Automation, etc. concepts are hard to understand and hard to conceive of, is because it takes a specific amount of computer science and economic knowledge to understand what is actually causing automation (the process of automating), AI (the ability for a computer or algorithm to acquire and apply knowledge) and the socio-cultural implications of carrying out automation

The reason these themes are difficult to understand and end up most times interpreted incorrectly, are because not every individual is able to grasp the concepts surrounding the structure of knowledge, looking into the economic and moral implications of AI and automation. For example, routines – what do we do everyday – These are the most easily automated things that we should look to see automated. This means that there will be a widening or gap within skill groups that either are not cost effective to automate, which means these jobs will continue to exist until automation becomes cheap enough to automate them (for example cleaning services); and on the other side, jobs that require a large amount of rationalization, compilation, and situational context and associative behavioral awareness will not be, in the near future replaced by AI because of the complexity required to cross the socio-cultural divide that makes it “ok” for machines to make a decision when it comes to something that affects “life or death”.

It isn’t because the machine cannot make the decision based on well defined data. It is that the machine will have a hard time being judged morally and ethically for the behavior tied to those mechanisms for which it chooses. The other piece that makes the divide even more difficult to create an environment for better industry acceptance, lends itself to the domain knowledge the programmers have about a given industry. You can only create something as good as what you can structure.

Automate to Help

As a business, you will never have a choice to automate or not – you must

Michael Cantu

I like to think of the process of automating (automation) with friction – with cost and acceptance being the two variables that create this friction, and that with less cost and more acceptance the process is sped up and friction removed. The reason why lay in that with lower cost, companies grow larger reserves, with the savings sometimes passing down to consumers which creates higher acceptance in certain categories of automation. The less cost passed down – the higher the acceptance rate.

As a business, you will never have a choice to automate or not – you must. It is more a question of how you’re