By Zhangtong Cheng, Junior Project Manager of Art-Science
On 3rd November, swissnex China successfully held a «tell» event with the topic of “The Future of Work: AI shifts in Critical Skills”. As part of the Swiss Digital Days 2020 and the #nex20 campaign, the event was in close collaboration with digitalswitzerland, swissnex Network, Tencent Research Institute, and the University of Zurich.
Besides two keynote speakers – Dr. Siyan Xu from Tencent Research Institute and Ms. Iris Long from Central Academy of Fine Arts, we have also invited Dr. Inez von Weitershausen, Head of Learning & Outreach – Center for Leadership in the Future of Work, University of Zurich to moderate the discussion session with the participation of both online and on-site audience. After three rounds of in-depth discussion, Prof. Jochen Menges, Chair of Human Resource Management and Leadership, University of Zurich delivered a concluding remark emphasizing human skills.
We would like to express our appreciation to our moderator and speakers: Dr. Inez von Weitershausen, Dr. Siyan Xu, Ms. Iris Long and Prof. Dr. Jochen Menges. Due to time constraints, we could only present a limited discussion. If you have further questions for our speakers, please email us at artscience@swissnexchina.org. We will try our best to forward them to the speakers.
The video recording of the webinar is here.
Human beings have been discussing and exploring the future of artificial intelligence since its creation. The relationship between humanity and artificial intelligence is at the center of discussion. Various possibilities have been discussed not only in the technical fields but also in literary works. On one hand, artificial intelligence has the potential to reshape the future of human society. On the other hand, the uncertainty of it can also cause concerns among people.
The different attitudes by Jack Ma and Elon Musk on the 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference towards how the future of work will be influenced by artificial intelligence set the tone for our discussion.
Structural Changes of Work Skills by AI
Dr. Siyan Xu started her speech with some common scenarios of AI’s application in our daily life. Various kinds of automation and self-service machines enabled by AI are becoming increasingly common. She pointed out that we need to understand what exactly AI is capable of in order to reveal how AI will shift the future of work.
According to Dr. Xu, AI’s core technology is deep learning consisted of four parts: sensing capability, recognizing capability, computing intelligence, and decision making. It is a process that transforms the input of structured or unstructured data into the output of classification, prediction or automation.
She pointed out structural changes to work skills brought about by AI with a Task Classification Matrix: AI will replace some routine and procedural jobs and empower jobs that require strong problem-solving and interpersonal skills.
Then it came to the essential question: How do we differentiate ourselves from our “silicon counterparts”? Dr. Siyan Xu emphasized human sensibilities with example of several unique characteristics of human, like subjective judgment and insights (politician, CEO…), complex emotions, empathy (education, psychologist…), people management, collaboration (Managers, HR), innovation (scientists, research), creativity (art, performance…), and complex physical jobs (babysitting, massage). She concluded that 60% of occupations have at least 1/3 or more tasks that can be automated but less than 5% of jobs can be entirely automated. Therefore, the key for the future of work is to collaborate with AI.
"Thinking Machines": Automation and Complexity of Creative Work
Ms. Iris Long focused more on the art and culture perspective. She elaborated on Jack Ma and Elon Musk discussion with the example of Sophia and Alexa.
Continuing on Dr. Siyan Xu’s analysis, she proposed that instead of standing aside thinking AI as the “other”, human beings should work together with AI since AI is never the philosophical “other”, as long as the models still rely on input data from human behavior.
Ms. Iris Long later dug deeper into data and algorithms based on her research and curatorial experiences. She talked about the vulnerability of algorithms which was barely noticed before the outbreak of Covid-19. Taking the radical change to purchase model resulted from panic buying of toilet paper as an example, she explained that algorithms became ineffective in this case, because the machine-learning models trained on normal human behavior are now faced with abnormal situations. Machine-learning models are designed to respond to changes. But most are also fragile; they perform badly when input data differs too much from the data that they have been trained on. It is a mistake to assume that people can just set up an AI system and walk away. Rajeev Sharma, global vice president at Pactera Edge said: “AI is a living, breathing engine.”
Then she came to the creative industry which is also facing the huge “AI paradigm shifts”. Nowadays, artists also start diving into data science. Many of them are working with AI.
She mentioned that for artists, the focus is not on the simple fear of getting replaced by AI, but that AI is challenging the underlying value of creativity. According to Vladan Joler and Matteo Pasquinelli, authors of The Nooscope Manifested: AI as Instrument of Knowledge Extractivism, the hackneyed question “Can AI be creative?” should be reformulated in technical terms on whether machine learning is able to create works that are not imitations of the past, to extrapolate beyond the stylistic boundaries of its training data, and to go beyond the detection of styles from the training data and then random improvisation within these styles.
Artists are not only using AI as tools but also investigating into the backstage of the creative industry.
In Ms. Iris Long’s conclusion, she proposed a “vibration solution” by taking elements from different models. She stated that instead of going for one-off solutions, we should decompose the requirements into small ones. And hopefully, we can make the osculation between human beings and AI.
Discussion
After the keynote speeches, three rounds of discussions were moderated by Dr. Inez von Weitershausen. For each round of discussion, on-site audiences shift their seats and online audiences by raising their hand on Zoom in order to participate in the discussion. People from different backgrounds shared their personal experiences on how AI has influenced their work.
Discussion Round 1: Thinking about your day-to-day life, when and how do you engage with or experience AI?
Mr. Percy Chen, freelancer and swissnex China alumni, started the discussion with his job-hunting experience. He argued we should preserve the decision power for humans instead of AI to select candidates, because the potential of a person is very abstract, and it is irrational to let AI decide on human’s capability.
While Professor Maggie Guo from Renmin University showed an optimistic attitude. She referred to the image of AI in films and animations, saying that AI is a mirror of the humankind. The images of AI fabricated in films reflect our understanding of human beings. These changing images over the years have built up an archive for human autognosis.
Ms. Sophie Fan and Mr. Huanzhi Xu both expressed their fear of being analyzed by AI with examples of smart replies in emails and the driving navigation system and Spotify music recommendation function.
Discussion Round 2: Taking into account the information you have access to, how do you expect AI to impact your work going forward?
Mr. Stanm Yi, an Architect, acknowledged the positive role of AI for improving work efficiency and enabling more creativity in the architecture industry. He said that in practice, the control of time and budget was crucial to real estate businesses. AI could speed up the process of decision making and implementation. Therefore, he was looking forward to further development of the application of AI in his future work.
Then Mr. Xin Zhang, colleague of Mr. Stanm Yi added that, since AI helps reduce the burden of monotonous manual work, architects are able to invest more time in the creative part. Besides, he wished that AI could be utilized in exploring new forms or shapes in architecture to bring architects more inspirations.
Professor Lihua Wang from Shanghai University working on librarian science suggested that we should expand AI’s capacity of analyzing data in helping people to search for information in the published literature and discover the relations between them.
Our online audience also joined for discussion. Mr. Dante Larini from swissnex headquarters shared his experience of working with AI on social campaigns. He pointed out that in short term, he was glad for AI’s support in collecting and analyzing data on social media. While thinking in long term, he was concerned that AI would replace him with the development of technology.
Ms. Rachel Zhao, a fundraiser, also talked about the application of AI in social campaigns from a fund-raising perspective. She shared with us the efficiency of applying AI in screening information for relationship building. Nevertheless, she stated that AI was not able to replace humans in terms of connecting people. She thought the essence of social relationship relies on ongoing personal interaction. Besides, she also attached importance to the balance between the use of data and privacy protection.
Discussion Round 3: Considering the impact that AI could have on your job, how do you feel about the future?
Ms. Yi Chen, a journalist, shared her feelings towards working with AI. On the one hand, she felt that the journalists are greatly challenged by AI, since AI has been increasingly used to write news, especially in big data-related areas like financial news. On the other hand, she was also positive about adopting AI in work like recording or translating to save more time for journalists to focus on investigating and creating better content.
Mr. Andre Gisiger, an entrepreneur in virtual coaching, expressed his excitement about AI. He is working closely with AI, and he thought that in terms of training, AI provides access to people who didn’t have the access before. However, it will not replace human interaction but serve as a supplement. The key is how AI will be used by people.
Ms. Krithika Ragunathan, another online guest pointed out that AI could help handle repetitive tasks to enable people for more challenging and exciting work.
Expert Conclusion
Prof. Dr. Jochen Menges pointed out that this «tell» event was enabled by technology but brought out the best of us as humans by conversing, discussing and debating viewpoints. He emphasized that we are living in a time of change, and how we interpret that change will influence how we feel. In turn, how we feel will tell us, to some extent, how we will prepare and behave towards that future. The core issue is that we need to become better people: we need to invest in our human skills, not just our technological skills. We need to make more of what it is that makes us human, and less of what we used to do and what now machines can do.
He summarized that when we think of the kind of skills that we invest in, we also need to invest in becoming better people. The history of humans is much about toolmaking and improving technologies. But what has really brought us forward as humanity was cooperation, the fact that we can work with one another. He encourages us all to think not just about what the future of work will be like, but also what we want the future of work to be. What would you wish the future of work to be? Because the future hasn't arrived yet, it is for us to shape it, and we can shape it together.