Will AI really take our jobs? That’s the question dominating discussions at technology conferences and boardrooms across the country, and it was front and centre at DTX Manchester.
The Digital Transformation Expo Manchester brought together experts to debate what technological change means for businesses and their employees — and whether the apocalyptic predictions about AI replacing millions of jobs have any substance.
Impact on Young Workers
Host Gwyn Slee, chief technology officer and “AI Evangelist” at G-Star Intelligence, raised concerns about what AI means for young people entering the workforce.
“Using AI in the short term might make sense because it’s faster and cheaper,” Slee said. “But is that storing up problems down the line because young skilled people aren’t being hired?”
Richard Whittle, professor of artificial intelligence and public policy at the University of Salford, was blunt: our current way of training and developing experts is over.
“There is little point in your organisation hiring as you were 10 or 20 years ago,” he added. Instead of recruiting young graduates as generalists, companies might have to move to “deep specialisation”, hiring people with very specific and often very technical skills.
Skills for the AI Age
Keeley Crockett, professor in computational intelligence at Manchester Metropolitan University, said young recruits needed ethical skills and the ability to verify information.
“Unless you know how machine learning models work, how can you possibly verify what that AI comes out with? I’m very worried about complacency down the line,” she said.
Caroline Ellis, AI and data ethics lead at NatWest Group, agreed firms needed to rethink what “entry level” means to ensure there are still career opportunities for young people.
She asked bosses: “How is your business going to run in a few years’ time?” If there are no junior or mid-managers, who will run those businesses once existing leaders move on or retire?
Cost Considerations
The panel also debated how AI should be used and what skills were most vital. Slee noted that AI could be “superhuman in some areas” but “if you want it to tell you a joke, it’s absolute rubbish.”
Whittle asked why AI is being used, particularly when it can give a worse outcome than human output. “Because,” he said, “it’s really cheap.”
“This is why we’re seeing an absolute explosion in very poor but very cheap AI output,” he added.
The experts raised concerns about what happens when AI pricing changes. Currently AI tools are cheap or free, but prices will rise once the technology becomes embedded in business operations.
“You are paying less than we should and they are going to put the prices up,” Ellis said. “If you were paying 12 times what you pay now, would you still choose to deploy it?”
Whittle said firms needed to assess where “humans in the loop” should be and make realistic cost assessments. If companies shed jobs and abandon graduate training schemes hoping to save cash, “and then the price goes up 10 or 15 times”, they may end up with total dependency on AI when “the pricing is outside your control”.
Lessons from the Post Office Scandal
Bryan Glick, editor of Computer Weekly, spoke about the Post Office scandal, when hundreds of people were wrongly prosecuted for failures of the Horizon IT system.
Glick noted the scandal’s roots went back 24 years and that Computer Weekly had been reporting on it for that time, recognising that the problems had the “noxious whiff” of a serious problem with officials not accepting there could be any problems with the system despite mounting evidence.
“The key issue for organisations using AI and other tech is accountability,” Glick said. “Leaders and employees alike need to know when to ask questions of the technology and of each other, and must not assume technology is infallible.”
He warned it will be harder in future to solve any tech crises involving AI, as we often don’t know exactly what is going on inside those models.
Sharron Gunn, chief executive of BCS the Chartered Institute for IT, said with AI there always needed to be a “human in the loop” with everyone at a company, including board members, needing to know what to ask about technology.