At the recently concluded world economic forum, it was stated that AI would take away 14 million jobs in the next 5 years and that 44% of today's technology personnel need to upgrade their skills. Do you agree?

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I don't agree with the 14 million number ad 44%. Although automation with AI will take some jobs, it will also create some. Putting such percentages and numbers are not very realistic. The world and the people evolve by themselves, up-skill themselves, create opportunities by themselves and same we have experienced in the past during other Industrial Revolutions.

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Yes but not due to AI. It has been my experience that when a person goes to college to earn an "IT" degree, what they learned in their first 2-years is obsolete - technology moves that fast. So in a sense 50% of our graduates already need to upgrade their skills.

AI is just technology doing what it always does, advancing at a rapid pace. Keeping up is always a challenge.

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Yep on the reskilling. The velocity of change is increasing and the tech lifecycle are shorter as capability and customer value is less and less coupled to hardware. However I don’t think it has a net decrease in technical support. Skills change. That velocity needs as much high touch to reduce disruption and keep transition smooth. But this is a hypothesis that will be tested fast.

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AI may make some jobs obsolete over the next few years. It will also create new jobs around building data models, algorithms, etc. I think sectors, where earlier we wouldn't have seen a lot of software developers, data scientists, etc. will employ such people - across various industries like manufacturing, construction, shipping, transportation, hospitality, etc. The full potential of Industry 4.0 is yet to be seen and realized.

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I can't agree because, well, I wouldn't even know how to do those maths.

BUT...

- Low level jobs will be replaced by mid to high-level job that leverage AI. We don't have secretaries typing letters for us, we write our emails ourselves. This is the same thing.
- white collar workers that don't use AI will be replaced by white collars workers that use AI
- When 10 people were needed, now 1-3 will suffice plus 1-3 low level admin/data entry ones

For instance: translation used to be 100% human based. With Neural Translation, this isn't needed anymore. Anyone can go to MS Word hit "review > translate document" and you're almost golden. You just need a person in the target language to sanity check the translation as it's good enough to be understood in most case. So instead of one human translator, we have a target-language specialist (e.g. a marketing manager in Germany checking the German automatic translation of an English brochure).

So, yes, lots of changes coming, low-level or easy to automate tasks or jobs will disappear.

At the recently concluded world economic forum, it was stated that AI would take away 14 million jobs in the next 5 years and that 44% of today's technology personnel need to upgrade their skills. Do you agree?

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