AI is a wonderful thing for some and an absolute nightmare for others.
While many in the tech industry only see the potential of what AI can achieve, most others only see the wheels of a corporate machine turning in a bid to get rid of jobs, or, in a worst-case scenario, they unleash something that they can’t take back.
Ignoring the doomsday prophecies about the rise of the machines for just a moment, an AI taking jobs is a legitimate scary concept that many are already feeling the effects of.
In a lot of places nowadays, machines have already taken over jobs that were once worked entirely by people.
In supermarkets, where there once were cashiers, there are now machine powered tills, in factories, where there were once machinists, there are now just machines.
This is a real and scary concept for people.
However, it shouldn’t be taken as the end of days. Although these jobs are gone, more jobs have been created in their place, just in different areas.
Change scares humanity greatly, but this is not a change that should scare us. There are now many opportunities that we would have never had thanks to the rise of AI.
In this article, we will explore the jobs that have been created by AI, rather than the jobs lost to its rise.
Ethics Officers
With all the opinions and fear surrounding AI and its uses, we thought we’d go in hard with our first choice of job, which is an Ethics Officer.
AI is just a useful system, and surprisingly it doesn’t really have opinions or if it does, those opinions are not enforced.
As such, the system itself will work exactly as it is told.
Since machines don’t base their decisions on whether something is right or wrong, it is up to the person in charge of said machine to make the decisions.
Since humans are fallible and, given enough power and stupidity, liable to make morally ambiguous or down right reprehensible decisions, then we need someone in place to keep everything working nice and ethical.
This is where an Ethics Officer comes in. In the modern day, there is a demand for experts in Ethics and people who understand the nuances of societies.
Whereas most will see just a hypothesis and the solution to the hypothesis, Ethics Officers are there to research and check the systems for unintended bias or unfairness.
Our society has an undercurrent of subconscious biases that given the opportunity will be put into systems without us realizing.
There have been a couple of examples where AI meant for use in preventing crime turned out to profile based on racist bias’s thanks to the area it was used in having an undercurrent of race related tension, so Ethics Officers are definitely necessary to prevent this.
Data Scientists
Data Scientists are the masters of understanding huge amounts of data, whether it be unstructured or not, and with AI there will always be a huge amount of data to examine.
In a hypothetical, once the AI system is up and running, then it will be constantly accruing data.
Data scientists will be the ones to deal with this data.
These scientists will design and then build models which will track what will happen with the system based on the data they are receiving.
They will be able to understand future problems, see how the system is performing, make adjustments to the AI’s algorithms, and be able to make sure that everything is following the company lines.
Their role is key to making sure a system keeps working and there are no concerns in the future.
Data Engineers
If Data Scientists are the ones making sure the system is working towards its goal, Data Engineers are the ones providing Data Scientists with everything they need now.
These are the people that make sure the data is extracted from internal systems easily and without any issues before giving it to the data scientists to analyze.
Data Engineers are the maintenance men of data, and they are there to make sure that nothing is currently going wrong with the system, the AI’s training quality, and to fix any concerns as they become so.
Software Engineers
Software Engineers are the masters of integration. In order for data to be analyzed and the AI system to actually work, there needs to be an existing or a brand-new piece of software that the system can be integrated into.
Companies are not going to just want to get rid of all the systems that they spent years building, just so they can get new AI, and they are not going to want to spend thousands upon thousands of dollars to buy an entirely new system either.
Therefore, they will need a software engineer to come along and integrate every piece of equipment and apparatus with the new AI system.
Any of the little things software engineers will cover, from notifications to updates to the interface, working out any little but necessary components to make sure the system works perfectly.
Trainers And Educators
People are not going to understand these systems at first and if they do, they have probably had some experience with them before.
As such, you require someone who can train others into how to use and interact with the new AI system.
Enter trainers and educators. It is all well and good to say that you can just learn by doing or learn by reading, but there is no substitute for a good teacher.
Books can only give information and not answer questions on said information, and learning by doing runs the risk of doing something you can’t fix.
Educators can guide people down the right path without breaking any precious or necessary equipment with a gentle but firm touch.
Final thoughts
AI should not be something we should fear inherently. If anything is proven by this list, we should fear that someone will misuse it, not the system itself.
As such, it is important that new jobs around AI exist and that we have experts trained and ready to deal with the systems in place, rather than fearing what these systems can do themselves.
The jobs created by these systems will be indispensable and a perfect field of industry for any new graduate to move into.
