Wednesday, March 20, 2019

AI Impact on Jobs in IT

As has happened with earlier economic shifts such as the industrial revolution, there will be major changes in job markets, with implications for social policy as artificial intelligence possibly brings on a new and major economic era.

“Middle-level jobs that require routine manual and cognitive skilled are the ones that are most at risk,” Gartner researchers say. The big issue is workforce change.

“In the long run, initial labor displacement effects of jobs with routinised manual or cognitive skills, as in previous industrial revolutions, will be compensated for by the growth in non-routine jobs at the high and low end of the economy.”

One example Gartner cites is program and portfolio management, an information technology function.

“By 2030, 80 percent of the work of today’s project management (PM) discipline will be eliminated as artificial intelligence (AI) takes on traditional PM functions such as data collection, tracking and reporting,” Gartner says.  

New jobs will be created, without a doubt. Still, there also will be widespread job losses. A two-year study from McKinsey Global Institute suggests that by 2030, intelligent agents and robots could eliminate as much as 30 percent of the world’s human labor.

McKinsey believes that, in terms of scale, the automation revolution could rival the move away from agricultural labor during the 1900s in the United States and Europe.

McKinsey reckons that, depending upon various adoption scenarios, automation will displace between 400 million and 800 million jobs by 2030, requiring as many as 375 million people to switch job categories entirely.

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