departments of jobs are coming in .”
Kumar backs this up by citing the McKinsey Global Institute report Jobs lost , jobs gained : Workforce transitions in a time of automation . It charts a huge range of jobs that may be created under different scenarios through to 2030 , predicting that there will be enough human work to maintain full employment in the decade or so ahead .
“ People have this very wrong notion that AI will replace human jobs ,” continues Kumar . “ Rather , AI will complement certain tasks , so people have to upscale themselves to these tasks which are not repetitive and mundane . You will need the ability to make sense of a lot of data .
“ In some cases , this will be AI-led and human assisted . In some other cases , it will be human-led and AI assisted . You will start to realise the role which you need to play is between the human and the AI somewhere .”
COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY While much of the onus has been on businesses and governments to provision the necessary upskilling required to embrace AI to the full ,
Kumar also stresses an imperative for individuals to step up and learn .
“ Of course , one focus is how companies create opportunities for retraining and rescaling people ,” he says , “ but the second is about how individuals start to rescale him or herself .
“ The reason for that is , when you came into your current job , you came in with the current skill , or you trained for something . Now , if that is becoming irrelevant , isn ’ t that the responsibility of the individual also ? And now with the mass of online courses available , there ’ s enough content online for one to learn new skills and capabilities .”
Kumar refers to photography as an example . While humans may inherently have an eye for a quality photo opportunity , the add on skills of knowing how to frame , shoot and edit is what differentiates a professional from an amateur .
And it is the relative ease at which humans can learn which will help prevent the mass displacement of jobs that many fear . “ AI needs a lot of data to train itself , but a human can do a lot of things with very little data ,” Kumar adds .
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