Ingenieur Vol 77 Jan-Mar 2019 ingenieur 2019 Jan-March | Page 45

There are clear signs that AI will change or disrupt a whole host of industries: ● ● Intelligent transportation will make traffic way more efficient. ● ● Autonomous driving and electric cars will bring dramatic changes to the automotive industry. ● ● Personalised education will deliver efficiency gains for both teachers and students. ● ● In healthcare, early prevention and precision treatment have the potential to increase life expectancy. ● ● Precision drug trials will cut the cost and time of discovering new medicine. ● ● With real-time translation across multiple languages, communication will be easier than ever before. ● ● Tele c om ne t work O p er ation and Maintenance (O&M) will become more efficient. The list goes on. In just the past year since we launched Huawei Cloud EI and HiAI, we have already seen AI drive unprecedented momentum across all kinds of industries. AI will also change every organisation We have seen several technological revolutions since the 18th century. Each has had a huge impact on organisational structures, processes, and workforce skills. But AI will change jobs and skills in a way that is quite different from the previous revolutions. Previous revolutions led to huge demand for repetitive routine tasks, such as operating equipment in textile mills, and running car and phone assembly lines. AI will greatly boost automation in almost all aspects of an organisation. This means there will be much less demand for jobs that handle repetitive, routine tasks. Demand for data science jobs will keep rising, including those for data scientists and data science engineers with basic know-how in data science. The total number of these jobs will be much smaller than the number of jobs that handle repetitive, routine tasks. It is likely that organisations will become more diamond-shaped, with AI systems taking the place of the people at the bottom, where they handle huge volumes of repetitive and routine tasks. AI-triggered change has just begun. Finding the right problem is more important than devising a novel solution Change can mean good news for some and bad news for others, especially when the changes first start to emerge. Some people might get excited about the new, once-unimaginable functions that AI will make possible. These people will feel a strong urge to drive large-scale AI adoption. And there will also be those who feel anxious about underperforming AI projects, or who worry about the reliability and security of AI applications. These are the ones who will remain uncertain about how to best use AI in the future. If we look at the history of all GPTs, these reactions to AI are all very natural. There are four different phases along the AI productivity/adoption curve. We have just left the first phase, where exploration of AI technology and application takes place on a small scale. Now we are in the second phase, where new technology and society are colliding. From a tech perspective, more issues are emerging as AI technology continues to advance. If we look at things from an application perspective, however, the value of AI is seeing greater recognition as it comes into wider use. That said, existing policies, corporate processes, and workforces are built around older technologies, such as those in the information and Internet eras. The broader social environment is not yet ready for the AI era. Therefore, in this phase we see a certain degree of collision, even conflict, between tech development and society. However, AI will ultimately find itself in a social environment that is more conducive to its development and application. When that happens, we will step into the third phase, where we will see rapid, comprehensive advances in AI adoption and productivity. The fourth phase will be the golden era of AI, where humanity will benefit from a constant 43