“A Robot Stole My Job!”
The Unintended Consequences of
Artificial Intelligence
David Linthicum
EDITOR’S NOTE
In the 2017 Winter Doppler Quarterly’s cover article, Disruptor or Disrupted, we explored
how companies are using internet-based exponential technologies to gain competitive
advantage. This is the second article in our multi-part series discussing disruptive technolo-
gies and the strategies today’s businesses must adopt in order to thrive in a digital world.
The World Economic Forum expects
automation and Artificial Intelli-
gence, to result in the loss of at least
5 million jobs globally by 2020. Yes,
a robot, or an AI process on a com-
puter, is likely going to impact your
livelihood. How much, or how little,
depends upon what you do for a
living.
Machine Learning (a sub-category of AI) is the ability
to process huge volumes of data and complete tasks
more efficiently than a human. Moreover, ML actu-
ally learns. Once you set up a Machine Learning
model, it can understand and store different out-
comes based upon experiences or other input.
AI Across Industries
Let’s look at an AI process that picks stocks. On the
human side, a hedge fund analyst can look at all of the
available data, such as management performance,
past stock prices, and outlook for the future, and turn
that input along with experience into picking stocks
that hopefully go up.
Now let’s say an application that picks stocks is bound
to an ML engine, and can consider the same data as
the analyst, and also incorporate the knowledge and
experiences of a 1,000 other financial experts. Using
cloud-based processing that’s almost free, the hedge
fund administrators can employ as many of these
processes as they need. Information is processed
1,000,000 times faster, and stocks are picked and
plotted in seconds. That hedge fund analyst who
makes $1,000,000 a year with bonuses is easily
replaced with a cloud instance that costs $1,000 a
month.
SUMMER 2017 | THE DOPPLER | 57