Hello everyone! My name is Alentina and
I'm a PhD student at the University of
Cambridge. My research focuses on
organizational behavior, artificial
intelligence, and the future of work. In
today's video we'll talk about the
notion of AI taking over our jobs, we'll
go through three questions of how to
assess it, take a closer look at AI in
medicine, and end with some thoughts on
where humans excel. When we hear about AI
in the news or read about it online, what
do we often see? The narrative tends to
be something like: is AI going to take
over our jobs? Or you know, will AI make
humans obsolete? I think we already know
that media likes to sensationalize these
things, so my question to you would be,
what do you think? Is AI really going to
take over your job? Does it really have
the power to make you obsolete? What are
some steps that we can take? What are
some skills that we can attain to
strengthen our position and career
outlook? It's quite interesting because
as I started delving more into AI
research I couldn't help but read more
philosophy on what intelligence
entails, of what it means to be human, you
know, what is human uniqueness? Is
creativity a strength only reserved for
humans? Or can AI also be creative? We
know that AI can learn, but can it learn
the way that humans do? And will it
eventually be able to learn things
within historical and societal contexts?
Is that even necessary for a machine? Is
the machine simply processing
information or is it actually learning?
And do we even need AI systems to mimic
human intelligence? Might it benefit
society if we create machines that learn
differently than humans so that machines
can actually compliment how and what we
learn. There just so many questions to
ask, right?
But yes, I'm sure many of you who are
interested in AI are also drawing from
philosophy and psychology and
linguistics and neuroscience and ethics.
Because to really understand the impact
of AI you can't look at it in isolation
as just a branch of computer science. And
through these discussions all embed
these philosophical and psychological
perspectives. But if we're to try to
answer these questions about whether or
not AI will take over our jobs in a more
practical fashion, we could say 1) we
need to have a clear understanding of
what the job entails so job description,
tasks, etc. 2) we need to know what the
strengths of AI are as it relates to
that particular job and 3) we need to
know how AI can be applied to that
particular job. Now, these are very basic
but fundamental questions so let's get
into it. It might be easy to illustrate
this with one running example, so let's
use physicians for this one. Going back
to this concept of AI hype, if we're to
discuss AI in the context of medicine we
can't just blindly say that "AI is going
to replace physicians," which not
surprisingly, I'm sure you'll find plenty
of articles promoting this narrative.
Also, a quick side note here, a lot of the
AI that's currently used in healthcare
at the moment is for administrative
tasks such as scheduling appointments,
digitalising records -  medical records, and
reminder systems to call or email
patients about appointments and
prescriptions. So when you see the
headlines that say something like "AI is
revolutionizing medicine," look for a
description of the AI system to see if
it's more administrative, research for
drug development, or if it's diagnostics
and surgery. Okay, when we look at the
overall job, in this case a physician's
job, we need to have a clear
understanding of
what the job entails so as to know how AI
might take over or not of this
position. Or we can also look at it
through a positive lens of how AI can
benefit physicians. So to cover the first
part, we could say a physician's job
description is to diagnose and treat
injuries or illnesses. And how do they do
this? By examining the patient, taking
into consideration the patient's medical
history to provide a holistic approach
to the problem, by requesting diagnostic
tests, interpreting the tests and when
necessary, recommending the patient to go
and see a specialist. In addition,
physicians also counsel their patients
on steps needed to prevent or cure the
illness and depending on the severity of
the illness it may be a simple process
of recommending lifestyle and diet
changes or it could be prescribing
medication or if it's very severe then
performing surgery. So now that we have a
gist of what the job entails, the second
step is to look at which aspects
of a physician's job can be diverted to
an AI system and for that we
need to have an awareness of the diverse
applications of AI available today
specifically in medicine. So does the
physician rely on imaging data? If yes, we
have AI systems that diagnose tests. This
is often used in radiology, pathology,
dermatology, and ophthalmology. More
specifically, radiology has been the one
that's been most open to this, to using
AI. Traditionally what radiologists do is
they assess x-rays, CT scans, and MRIs
to detect, characterize, and monitor
diseases. But now, thanks to deep learning,
we have AI systems that can screen
hundreds, if not thousands, of images. They
can recognize complex patterns
within the data and provide diagnostic
predictions for the physician to assess.
The wonderful thing about AI is that it
can integrate and analyze data from
multiple sources to capitalize on the
availability of
data. And these different sources
of data are not just medical images but
also other medical tests and where
necessary genomics tests and also data
from medical devices that patients are
using to monitor their heart rate or
sleep or whatever other data that the
device is capable of gathering. The next
question, so if the physician is a
surgeon another question to ask would be:
do we have AI that performs surgeries? And
the answer is yes! Especially for
surgeries that require high levels of
precision like in urology or gynecology
or even in heart surgery. Physicians can
now use a robotic surgery arm and how it
works is the surgeon views a 3D image of
the surgical field and he or she has a
console where they can control the
surgery from a distance. Traditionally,
for example, heart surgery has been done
through open surgery where doctors have
to do a long incision down the center
of your chest and cut through your
breastbone to be able to perform the
surgery, but now with robotic surgery
it's minimally invasive. We can insert
robotic surgical arms and a camera
through a very tiny incision and use
these robotic arms to perform surgery
while viewing the details on a screen
from a distance. So now that we've
covered what a physician's job entails,
what the strengths of AI are for their
line of work, and how it can be applied,
our last question should be: what
percentage of these tasks are central to
the job? What I mean by this is if the AI
is excelling at medical diagnosis we
need to ask, do medical diagnosis take up
20% of a physician's job? 50%? 70%? Because
the AI of today is very narrow, it can
only do one specialized task at a time.
And we all know that in any job, whether
that's a physician or a lawyer or an
engineer or any other profession there
are multiple tasks that
comprise the entirety of one's work. If
AI is excellent at performing one
particular task we have to ask, to what
extent is my job
defined by that particular task? If it's
a significant portion, then we can say "ok
the future of this profession is a bit
rocky" and if it isn't, then we can say
"it's a lot safer,  it won't be taken over by
AI, at least not anytime soon." So let's refer back
to the physician example, we see that AI
is great at analyzing complex medical
data, it's great at finding patterns in
diagnostic reports, and robotic
surgical arms are wonderful for
performing complex surgeries. But even
knowing all of this, we still can't make
the bold statement that AI will replace
physicians, because a physician's job
isn't only to perform surgery or only to
assess diagnostic tests. Where AI is weak,
humans are strong. And AI lacks the human
approach. It lacks the situational and
historical context and understanding that
is often needed to assess, cure, or
prevent disease. Our current systems are
so narrow in scope that when it comes to
health, we need to have more of a systems
mindset to holistically assess the
illness and holistically cure or prevent
it. We can't look at any illness or
injury in isolation. Physicians don't
just assess patients' physical ailments
but they take into consideration the
patient's mental well-being, their
lifestyle, external stressors, and a
number of other factors that no machine
can do. So instead of talking about how AI will replace jobs, it's more useful to
run through these questions for our own
profession and see where the differences
lie between humans and machines. By doing
so, we can shift our focus to how AI can
be used to augment human work and how AI
can be used for our own good, to make us
better, and to make society better.
And an important point, one that I'd like
to end this video on, is the need for
everybody to be a part of this
conversation, to be a part of building AI
systems. Working together with engineers,
we can build AI that truly supports
employees because although engineers
will have all the technical skills to
build the latest and the greatest AI
systems, it's the people on the ground,
it's the people who are day in and day
out doing the job who will truly know
what is needed of an AI system to
transform their work. And through these
conversations with professionals and
engineers we can create AI systems that
can be used not just to make our jobs
better but really for the greater good
of humanity. And that's it for today,
thank you so much for spending your time
with me. I look forward to making more of
these videos where I can share my
research and ideas with you. If you
learned one new thing from this video
please consider liking, subscribing, and
sharing it. I think I will make maybe
about eight or ten more in this AI
series so keep an eye out in the coming
weeks. Yeah
and this is a new channel so the
likelihood of YouTube suggesting this
video is slim to none and I'd really
appreciate it if you can help by sending
it to three friends and sharing it on
your social channels. I wish you the most
wonderful day and thank you again
for spending it here with me. Take care
and God bless, until next time, bye!
