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AI will shift tasks around,

Well, is artificial intelligence a job-killer or not? We keep hearing both sides, from projections of doom for many professions that will necessitate things such as universal basic income to help sidelined workers, to projections of countless unfilled jobs needed to build and manage AI-powered enterprises. For a worker losing his or her job to automation, knowing that an AI programming job is being created elsewhere is of little solace.

Perhaps the reality will be somewhere in between. An MIT report released at the end of last year states recent fears about AI leading to mass unemployment are unlikely to be realized. Instead, we believe thatlike all previous labor-saving technologiesAI will enable new industries to emerge, creating more new jobs than are lost to the technology, the reports authors, led by Thomas Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, conclude. But we see a significant need for governments and other parts of society to help smooth this transition, especially for the individuals whose old jobs are disrupted and who cannot easily find new ones.

The future of AI and job growth or losses may be nuanced, a recent report from BCG and Faethm suggests. Though these technologies will eliminate some jobs, they will create many others, the reports team of authors, led by BCGs Rainer Strack. Governments, companies, and individuals all need to understand these shifts when they plan for the future.

What needs to be understood? For starters, the net number of jobs lost or gained is an artificially simple metric to gauge the impact of digitization, Strack and his co-authors state. For example, eliminating 10 million jobs and creating 10 million new jobs would appear to have negligible impact. In fact, however, doing so would represent a huge economic disruption for the countrynot to mention for the millions of people with their jobs at stake.

Theres even a paradox in play. Computers tend to perform well in tasks that humans find difficult or time-consuming to do, but they tend to work less effectively in tasks that humans find easy to do, the report notes. Also, in many areas, technologies will improve the quality of work that humans do by allowing them to focus on more strategic, value-creating, and personally rewarding tasks.

In other words, AI cant take over many of the soft skills essential to businesses growth initiative, intuition, passion, and ability to sell ideas and concepts. Add that to more technical abilities needed to build and maintain AI and digital environments and keep them focused on what the business needs. In many sectors, severe shortages of skilled workers will mean that growth in demand for talent will be unmet, Strack and his co-authors state. This is particularly true for computer-related occupations and jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math, since technology is fueling the rise of automation across all industries. This is why the computer and mathematics job family group is likely to suffer by far the greatest worker deficits.

At the same time, there will also be increasing demand for jobs requiring compassionate human contact, such as health care, social services, and teaching, they add.

Along with the BCG-Faethms observations, it should be noted that AI cannot replicate the entrepreneurial skills that will be pulling together technology solutions and platforms to connect to the needs of markets. Humans are the innovators.

What to do? Strack and his team urge people to take charge of their professional development through lifelong learning. Individuals will have to take greater responsibility for their own professional development, whether that means through upskilling or reskilling, they state. Pay attention to sources of information and update skills accordingly, either by searching out high-quality providers of education or by charting your own course amid the vast amount of online-learning offers.

The BCG-Faethm team also makes the following recommendations from a corporate perspective:

Read more:
Artificial Intelligences Impact On Jobs Is Nuanced - Forbes

Could artificial intelligence reduce the need for human therapists?

Websites, smartphone apps and social-media sites are dispensing mental-health advice, often using artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, clinicians and researchers are looking to AI to help define mental illness more objectively, identify high-risk people and ensure quality of care.

Some experts believe AI can make treatment more accessible and affordable. There has long been a severe shortage of mental-health professionals, and since the Covid pandemic, the need for support is greater than ever. For instance, users can have conversations with AI-powered chatbots, allowing them to get help anytime, anywhere, often for less money than traditional therapy.

The algorithms underpinning these endeavors learn by combing through large amounts of data generated from social-media posts, smartphone data, electronic health records, therapy-session transcripts, brain scans and other sources to identify patterns that are difficult for humans to discern.

Despite the promise, there are some big concerns. The efficacy of some products is questionable, a problem only made worse by the fact that private companies dont always share information about how their AI works. Problems about accuracy raise concerns about amplifying bad advice to people who may be vulnerable or incapable of critical thinking, as well as fears of perpetuating racial or cultural biases. Concerns also persist about private information being shared in unexpected ways or with unintended parties.

Excerpt from:
Can Artificial Intelligence Replace Human Therapists? - The Wall Street Journal

The Energy Department, in all aspects of its work, is turning to artificial intelligence to accelerate its output.

DOEs Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) is using artificial intelligence to monitor threats to the electric grid. Its inspector general is looking at AI to flag potential fraud.

Fred Streitz, the chief AI scientist in DOEs Artificial Intelligence and Technology Office, said all of the agencys offices are using AI at some level, and said the use cases are getting more advanced.

Its going to touch everything, in the same way that electricity now touches everything that happens. We believe that AI is going to wind up touching, in some way or another, almost every aspect of our lives going forward, Streitz said last week at an AI conference hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association.

Irene Qualters, the associate lab director for simulation & computation at DOEs Los Alamos National Laboratory, said the lab is working to harden AI algorithms against threats, improving the explainability of AI-produced results and quantifying the certainty AI models have in making predictions.

The lab is also looking at AIs usefulness to study climate and natural disasters.

AI is opening a whole new avenue of exploration and understanding, Qualters said.

DOEs AI and high-performance capabilities factored heavily into the Trump administrations early response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The White House launched a COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortiumin March 2020 to give coronavirus researchers access to the worlds most powerful supercomputers.

But as DOE weaves AI into all aspects of its mission, the stakes become higher, and the need to ensure AI-powered work is transparent and reliable becomes greater. The National Nuclear Security Administration, for example, uses AI to assess data as part of its non-proliferation work.

Increasing use of AI in mission-critical areas where there are real-world consequences, we are working toward that. Its a direction we need to go because of the inherent advantages of using these AI technologies to exactly do something like create a more resilient grid, but trustworthiness is an important component of that, and thats another piece of research thats being done actively, Streitz said.

While DOE employs more than 10,000 scientists and engineers, Streitz said that the workforce only accounts for a fraction of the brainpower on AI research in the U.S. The agency, he added, relies on collaboration with other federal science agencies and the private sector.

Qualters said DOEs AI research in some cases focuses heavily on infrastructure use cases, while the National Science Foundation supports some of the fundamental research behind AI.

NSF and the Army Research Office, for example, supported recent research at Carnegie Mellon University that pitted an AI program against six professional players in a game of poker.

Streitz said AIs aptitude at poker, compared to its master of games like chess, marks a paradigm shift in the sophistication of these algorithms.

You cant just play the cards youre dealt, you have to change your odds, and that means bluffing. But what is bluffing at the end of the day? Bluffing is lying. You have to pretend that you have cards you dont have. And the notion that we can actually teach a computer how to do that it understands that there are situations when it knows perfectly well what cards it has, and it knows what all the odds are, and it simply decides, now is a good time to fake it thats really a fundamental difference from, for instance, chess, he said.

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Its going to touch everything. Energy Department weaves AI into mission-critical work - Federal News Network

The following article is a part of our April Fools edition, The Scoop. The content of these stories is entirely fabricated and not to be taken seriously.

With low participation from the most recent underclassmen at Bradley, the university has implemented artificial intelligence to replace club members.

As part of a senior capstone project, Jeff Echo, a computer science major, developed a program to help prevent clubs from losing the full experience of extracurriculars.

I remember when student organizations were a big part of my life, and sitting at the meetings gave me a chance to bond with other students, Echo said. I dont want incoming students to lose that environment.

So far, three clubs have taken part in the senior capstone project.

The Campus People-Watchers Club, Juggling Club and Anti-Pizza Crust Association have all seen a decrease in general member enrollment. They also hadnt had enough people running for executive board positions to replace any graduated seniors or students not running for re-election.

As an artificial intelligence program, taking club positions while attending a university seems to be a big accomplishment for A.I., Cee Threepwo, treasurer of the Campus People-Watchers Club, said. We help enhance the club experience for our peers by adding more members to the rosters and handling position responsibilities, showing what A.I. is capable of.

Not only are these virtual club members handling the duties that student organizations need to have done, but they are also capable of building relations with other members.

According to Echo, with classes being on Zoom, the A.I. can watch hours worth of lectures from various departments and understand what assignments, projects or topics they might be learning in class.

Conversations are a tool we use to have a greater retention in the club, meaning potential growth for the club in the future, Avery Nest, another A.I. program serving as secretary for the Juggling Club, said. This is to also avoid students from feeling lonely.

While conversations are meant to be as natural as possible, some students have noted some hiccups in their interactions with the new exec members.

One of the general members of the Juggling Club, Esmeralda Tesla, said that after talking with the A.I. program, it asked for feedback on the conversation. Along with that, it also sent a long terms and agreements contract.

It was really strange, but at the same time, I cant compare it to any other since this is the only time Ive been to a club meeting at Bradley, Tesla, freshman nursing major, said.

As for next semester, with classes returning back to campus, Echo sees this as a chance to make A.I. fully immersed in a college environment. Echo plans on teaming up with students interested in robotics and engineering to see if they could build a robot to put the programs in.

Alexa Bender, a virtual club member who is now limited to the Zoom environment, seems to be looking forward to becoming more human.

Perhaps I shall live up to my full potential as a member of the Anti-Pizza Crust Association with a functioning body, Bender, vice president, said. I may tear all crusts off of pizzas and fling them into the sun. Only when all pizzas have no crust will I rest and have completed my purpose.

See the article here:
Artificial intelligence is being put into power of student organizations The Bradley Scout - The Scout

Although they can bring great benefits in everyday work, many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) shy away from applications based on artificial intelligence. But AI offers a lot of potential, especially in quality control. Nevertheless, training the models is difficult and hardly feasible without mathematical knowledge, as there are countless parameters that can go into such an analysis. And once an AI algorithm is learned, it is trained only on the specifications it learns. If a product design or the geometry of a component is later changed even slightly, the algorithm recognizes this as an error and the AI must be retrained.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT in Ilmenau, Germany, have now developed the IDMT-ISAAC software, which can be operated even without extensive expert AI knowledge. IDMT-ISAAC stands for Industrial Sound Analysis for Automated Quality Control. We want to enable SMEs to adapt and customize AI algorithms themselves, says Judith Liebetrau, group leader of Industrial Media Applications at Fraunhofer IDMT. They can apply IDMT-ISAAC to their own audio data, retrain it, and thus get fast and reliable results and decision support for their quality assurance.

IDMT-ISAAC relies on acoustics for analysis, since in many cases it is possible to detect defects just by the sound of the process. To train the AI, the scientists use recorded acoustic data from welding processes. The AI analyzes the typical noises that occur and draws conclusions about the quality of the respective weld seam from the audio data. If, for example, the geometry of a product is then changed, the user can teach this to IDMT-ISAAC with just a few clicks. As early as summer 2021, the software should be adapted to live operation to the extent that the system can immediately analyze real-time data from production and optimize quality assurance. In three to four years, it should even be able to actively intervene in production.

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But the framework at the heart of IDMT-ISAAC doesnt offer new analysis options just for welding. We have integrated various methods in the modular system to be able to map other processes, such as milling, relatively quickly, Liebetrau explains. Companies that already have their own software should also be able to use it in the future. They will also be able to access the institutes AI via an interface on the Fraunhofer IDMT server. It is important to the developers here to emphasize that data protection and data security would always be observed and that the data would be processed anonymously, regardless of whether companies access the AI via an interface or it is integrated into the company via the framework.

For different user groups AI novices as well as AI experts the software can be customized via different user profiles. For example, developers of AI algorithms are very interested in getting a feel for how AI makes its decisions and the sounds it uses to make them, says Judith Liebetrau. So we are also moving a bit in the direction of Explainable AI with the framework to make AI more comprehensible, Liebetrau says.

The researchers will present IDMT-ISAAC at the Hannover Messe from April 12 to 16, 2021. At the virtual booth, Bescher will apply artificial intelligence models using the IDMT-ISAAC software to industrial audio data to verify its quality.

Cover photo: Fraunhofer IDMTs new IDMT-ISAAC software framework provides AI-based audio analysis tools that can be used by users without expert AI knowledge. istock.com/Byjeng, istock.com/TIMETOFOCUS

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Acoustic Quality Control with the Help of Artificial Intelligence - Innovation Origins