Is AI a Job Killer or Merely the Next Disruptive Technology?

­Artificial Intelligence, AI, has the potential to transform our world in a way that few disruptive technologies have. While other tech innovations have made our lives easier, we’re potentially planting the seeds of our own obsolescence with AI. But is AI a true tech singularity, upon which we’ll have “passed the point of no return”? Will AI supplant the human labor pool, or is it more akin to past disruptive technologies than we’d care to admit?

Agita over automation is certainly nothing new. As the original Industrial Revolution took hold in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, millions of rural and agricultural workers moved from the countryside to blossoming urban landscapes, leading to unprecedented social upheaval.

Fast forward to the 20^th century and the Great Depression, and the doomsayers were once again bemoaning the alleged death of the human labor pool, with influential British economist John Maynard Keynes claiming we were “being afflicted with a new disease” called technological unemployment.

In all these cases, technology deposed obsolete professions while providing the foundation for new, tech-literate replacements. Is AI really so different?

While the World Economic Forum has predicted that 1/3 of all jobs could become automated in the next decade, and CNN runs scary headlines like “AI is replacing human tasks faster than you think,” others are taking a more sober assessment.

Writing for Forbes, Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio, Senior fellow at Harvard University, says that “Yes, AI will take your job; however, it will gift two or three new jobs in its place. The thing is, we can’t be certain what those new jobs will be.”

Of course, industry is diving headfirst into the AI revolution, with nine companies – including Cisco, Google, IBM, Intel and Microsoft – forming the AI-Enabled Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Workforce Consortium to evaluate "how AI is changing the jobs and skills workers need to be successful."

Last year, we reported that the ICT Workforce Consortium vowed to produce a comprehensive report analyzing the impact of AI on 56 ICT job roles, and amongst other things, “The Transformational Opportunity of AI on ICT Jobs” underlined industry’s long-term (and monetary) commitment to training millions of workers with cybersecurity and digital skills (including AI) over the next decade.

Consortium members’ own internal research supports the employment opportunities afforded by AI, like IBM’s Institute Business Value (IBV) survey, which asserts that 87% of executives expect job roles to be augmented, rather than replaced, by Gen AI.

So, will AI be a net negative for human employment? History suggests otherwise, and even if AI is uniquely transformative for the human experience, we appear to be following a similar cycle as past disruptive technologies.