Recently read article in Economic Times about “ Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) create mass unemployment?” So thought to do a bit of research on this topic. With the rapid technological changes, the world is shifting from manual labour to complete automation. As compared to humans, Computers and robots are quite opposites they can do the same task 24/7 without drifting away and without getting influenced by emotional quotient just like human.

With these facts just one thought came to my mind will these advancement of Artificial Intelligence will cause mass unemployment?

There are plenty of scary headlines about robots are taking jobs across all the levels and departments. But according to PwC’s international job automation study which analyse the job market in 29 countries says that just 1% of jobs will disappear thanks to automation which includes AI as a subset.

Using AI increases productivity but it does not mean being replaced by machines. AI is not threat that will increase unemployment, but rather a technology that can ensure that our jobs will not be moved to low cost labour countries. Apart from that AI will create job opportunities in engineering and R& D.

In this entire discussion we should consider the fact that human brain is far more advanced, efficient and possesses more computational power than the most impressive super computer that have been ever built. The brain is actually able to do more calculations per second than even the fastest super computer. Of course, the brain makes a single calculation much slower than a supercomputer, but the brain can actually execute more calculations per second because it is “massively parallel.”

In conclusion, I would say rather than considering AI as threat to unemployment we should act now to reskill and reorganize the workforce to take advantage of AI’s remarkable power along with the human skill.