Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Labour Markets

The jobs and employment prospects of educated white collar professionals could soon be under threat following rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI). Although artificial intelligence has been used in industry since the 1990s, its application and impact has been confined to lower level, unskilled or semi-skilled blue collar jobs. However, the declining cost of sensors and computing power (Moore’s Law), the recent digital data deluge from social networking and new ways of interacting with computers via mobile devices, has given rise to a new form of “cognitive computing”. IBM and Google have become leading players in this field. IBM’s Watson computer has overcome the notorious problem of mastering “natural language”. Google, meanwhile, has been building on its existing huge data set by developing a world class artificial intelligence laboratory.