Tempe, Arizona — Robots are taking our jobs!
Human fear of artificial intelligence has long been a polarizing topic in U.S. pop and tech culture, politics, and even some academia, and it’s becoming more so as AI technology becomes more prevalent.
AI technology has come a long way since its inception in the 1950s. A company in Arizona is helping to demystify common AI misconceptions by training the next generation of AI engineers.
“Some people call AI a black box, but AI is a highly coined term because of its complex, confusing, and deeply analytical nature,” says Assistant Alec Evans. He is Director of Data Science at DriveTime, an online used car dealership and finance company based in Tempe.
In October and November, DriveTime partnered with the Mark Cuban Foundation to host its first in Arizona. Mark Cuban Foundation AI boot camp for high school students.
“And what we do here with our students is demystify it and say, ‘We use it every day, we see it every day, we just don’t know what it is.’ And I think we can really open up to our students.” Keep this new career opportunity in mind,” Evans said.
Description of AI
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AI is an umbrella term that encompasses many innovations such as machine learning and natural language processing. However, AI still has its boundaries and cannot perform many tasks that humans routinely perform.
“The biggest problem arises when there is a mismatch between the actual capabilities of technology and society’s perceptions. Aviral SrivastavaProfessor, Department of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University.
Society already relies on AI technology. From virtual assistants like Siri, Google, and Alexa, to applications like Netflix and YouTube that use machine learning algorithms to recommend content specifically tailored to your interests, AI is part of our everyday lives. department.
But many of the AI companies are embracing are overlooked, such as banking apps, email and spam filters, auto-correction tools, personalized ads, and even thumbnails of videos watched on YouTube.
Chatbots use natural language processing to determine and interpret what a user has asked and tabulate the correct responses according to the processed language. Self-driving cars are also progressing.
AI as a career path
DriveTime uses AI tools and analytics to help ease the process of buying a used car for customers, which Evans says are core to differentiating the company from its competitors. .
“Some people are looking for the car first, others are looking for the price first,” he said. “What we want to make sure is that our experience can be tailored for both of these shopping experiences.”
Bootcamps are four-week development programs that teach the fundamentals of AI, machine learning, natural language processing, and more, with students selected from across Phoenix Metro. Mark Cuban is a billionaire entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks. His foundation focuses on providing high school students with opportunities to learn about his AI and networks in the technology field.
The boot camps will start in 2019 and this year will be hosted by companies using AI technology with over 550 students in 26 US regions (20 in Silicon Valley).according to Foundation website, the camp enables students to meet employers in the corporate world and connect with adults working in STEM, AI, and machine learning. Students do not need to have coding experience.
Katica Calderon’s father enrolled a 14-year-old girl in bootcamp because of her interest in AI and how it could help others.
“Everything I know about AI so far comes from my father,” said Calderon, who hopes to one day work in the field. “He gave me Alexa, so I started researching how it worked and became really interested in things like that.”
Building networking skills and helping students understand that a profession using AI technology offers a viable career path is what makes the boot camp so important, said DriveTime’s HR responsibilities. Principal Robyn Jordan said.
“It’s kind of a new career journey and where the future is headed,” said Jordan, noting that companies need to adopt technology and start educating them early. “I think as people start to understand what it can do and embrace it without fear, they will try to find better ways to use it.”
robots and your work
A concern some people have about AI technology is that it will make some human jobs obsolete.
Human employees can handle multiple tasks at once and think critically about what they are doing and why. Machines cannot think, but they can complete mundane and dedicated tasks faster and more efficiently than humans.
“Even when humans do[low-risk tasks]they’re not perfect,” says Shrivastava. “So they make mistakes too. AI can do a decent enough job. In fact, AI can systematically look at all the parameters and see much more data than humans can.” You can do a much better job because you can, have patience to see.
Human error and fatigue aside, another important difference between machine learning algorithms and humans is that humans are biased and machines are unbiased. Algorithms simply calculate rather than form trends or infer data misbehavior.
“The way[machine learning]algorithms are designed just reflects what the data is telling them, so if the data is biased, the predictions are also biased,” says Shrivastava. “Algorithms are so effective that we started using them where fairness mattered. Prior to that, algorithmic standards never mattered. Why? Because it was never used in the situation.”
Shrivastava explained that when companies use algorithms to determine employee compensation amounts, the algorithms rely on previous compensation data. However, when employers are not paying fair wages to certain employees or groups, AI appears to continue the negative trend in compensation, reaffirming human bias.
Earlier this year, the Forbes Technology Council, an organization of tech executives, said: List of 15 jobs and tasks They expect it to be automated within 10 years, including jobs such as data coordination, accounting, driving, simple customer service, sales and marketing, all of which are at risk.
Algorithms may relieve the work of one person doing routine tasks, but it took at least one person to create and shape that algorithm. The assimilation and expansion of AI technology does not mean that jobs will disappear, but they may be diverted to higher paying tech jobs.
Evans shared a story about how her grandmother said she didn’t want a robot to drive her car.
“But grandma, what if you knew the robots were being taught to drive by someone like me? I’m working on those algorithms and telling them what to do and what not to do.”
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