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As Companies Embrace AI, It's a Job-Seeker's Market (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Artificial intelligence is now being used in an ever-expanding array of products: cars that drive themselves; robots that identify and eradicate weeds; computers able to distinguish dangerous skin cancers from benign moles; and smart locks, thermostats, speakers and digital assistants that are bringing the technology into homes. At Georgia Tech, students interact with digital teaching assistants made possible by AI for an online course in machine learning.
The expanding applications for AI have also created a shortage of qualified workers in the field. Although schools across the country are adding classes, increasing enrollment and developing new programs to accommodate student demand, there are too few potential employees with training or experience in AI. That has big consequences. Too few AI-trained job-seekers has slowed hiring and impeded growth at some companies, recruiters and would-be employers told Reuters. It may also be delaying broader adoption of a technology that some economists say could spur U.S. economic growth by boosting productivity, currently growing at only about half its pre-crisis pace.
[...] U.S. government data does not track job openings or hires in artificial intelligence specifically, but online job postings tracked by jobsites including Indeed, Ziprecruiter and Glassdoor show job openings for AI-related positions are surging. AI job postings as a percentage of overall job postings at Indeed nearly doubled in the past two years, according to data provided by the company. Searches on Indeed for AI jobs, meanwhile increased just 15 percent.
The expanding applications for AI have also created a shortage of qualified workers in the field. Although schools across the country are adding classes, increasing enrollment and developing new programs to accommodate student demand, there are too few potential employees with training or experience in AI. That has big consequences. Too few AI-trained job-seekers has slowed hiring and impeded growth at some companies, recruiters and would-be employers told Reuters. It may also be delaying broader adoption of a technology that some economists say could spur U.S. economic growth by boosting productivity, currently growing at only about half its pre-crisis pace.
[...] U.S. government data does not track job openings or hires in artificial intelligence specifically, but online job postings tracked by jobsites including Indeed, Ziprecruiter and Glassdoor show job openings for AI-related positions are surging. AI job postings as a percentage of overall job postings at Indeed nearly doubled in the past two years, according to data provided by the company. Searches on Indeed for AI jobs, meanwhile increased just 15 percent.
The math behind it, to me, is impenetrable. I think for many people, without the necessary math background, learning AI will be difficult unless you're comfortable working with a black box, although I suspect that would only take you so far.
AI requires a lot of education and quite a background in technical expertise. It's great that there are many openings but the path to obtain the job is out of reach for a lot of people. It's certainly out of reach for me at 41 years old. I really hate the whole concept of AI because it is putting people out of work and interfacing with it is annoying, at best. I hate the telephone systems that try to interpret natural language to get you to "the right representative." It ends up being an exercise in frustration. What this sounds like is Late Stage Capitalism.
Agree,in the 60s,70s the idea was that people would have to work a lot less once technology took over most activities. For some reason,the opposite has happened.
Yes!
Not-having-to-work (i.e. losing jobs) can be viewed as our goal within all economic systems. No matter where you are on the spectrum of Adam Smith to Karl Marx, our time above-ground is a scarce resource. Every-fucking-thing that is expensive, is ultimately expensive because it used up someone's time, where that person sighed and walked a few more steps toward their dusty, eternal grave, working on your whatever, instead of living their life. The dollars are just a measurement of how much life you asked someone else to give up. It's a count of the grains of sand that fell to the bottom of someone's hourglass.
Jobs are bad. When a politician says he's going to create or save jobs, he is offering you a quicker, more intimately-embracing death. The more he envisions you toiling, the less you should envision yourself skipping through fields, rocking out to great bands, performing science experiments, climbing mountains and skiing down them while drinking Mountain Dew as explosions go off behind you, reading novels, or flying around in starships to go find green-skinned women to bang.
People become truck drivers for the money. If you want to spend your life driving around, there are vastly more pleasant ways to do that than driving a fucking truck. They are ticking down the limited seconds of their life, working instead of doing what they want to do. Good riddance to those jobs.
What should we do about the consequences of increased leisure time, in our legacy-saddled economy? Shit, I didn't say I have all the answers (sounds like Obama is proposing one idea, though). But can't we all at least get to where we agree that it's basically a good thing?!? Until we realize that increased leisure time for humans is a good thing, of course we're not going to figure out how to handle our victory, because we'll be putting all our effort into undoing or preventing it! It's disgraceful that people are using words like "blame" for the lost jobs, instead of "credit."
I'll be happy that my widget didn't cost some trucker (and yay, the trucker wasn't me!) two days of his life to transport, and instead it only cost some maintainer 12 hours to keep the robot running. And then eventually I'll feel bad about those 12 hours of maintenance being too many. Can't a robot maintain that other robot?
They hire only Artificial Intelligence, no wetware wanted.
Obviously the trucker must become an AI developer. New jobs for everyone! ... This just in! Higher IQ people do not understand not understanding by lower IQ people. More at 11 as the situation develops!
The reason these posts aren't being filled is that they're almost exclusively looking for AI researchers with postgraduate degrees. Admittedly, knowing the underlying math is incredibly useful if you're focusing on the core functionality of a library or trying to eke out that last bit of precision, but for a ton of applications, having some number sense and an understanding of core statistical/linear algebra principles is more than sufficient (i.e. you don't have to know how to solve by hand, just have an idea of what the numbers are supposed to look like and be able to tell when something's not right). You don't need a postgrad degree to do this, or even a Bachelor's (though you might have trouble convincing a company of this since they seem to be looking for PhDs). I expect that as need increases and more people of varying levels of education start messing with ML for their own projects, the system will move towards certifications, analogous to the cybersecurity industry.
AI requires a lot of education and quite a background in technical expertise. It's great that there are many openings but the path to obtain the job is out of reach for a lot of people. It's certainly out of reach for me at 41 years old.
This is pretty distressing to read, as it's really not at all the case. Do not think you could not enter this field - I started to transition to machine learning work last year, and am older than you are.
I would recommend taking some actual course to see if the work even interest you at all, but if you can program you can easily shift to working on machine learning work. Even the Data Science aspect to the work is not out of reach, though that would require more learning...
Something to consider is that the way AI works right now is not old at all so all the people working on it have not really had that much a head start over you. It's not like there's more than a handful of people with decades of AI work experience because until the last few years people were not using neural networks they way they are now, even though NN have been around as a concept quite a long time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
All you have to do is talk to the computer using this command: "Computer, create a program capable of defeating Data". Power draw increases momentarily, AI appears. Easy peasy...
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
As one of my favorite Computer Scientists, Ivor Paige, once put it, "there's more A than I in AI". What we're today calling AI is still limited-domain expert systems. True AI is still a ways off.
Organization? You must be joking..
Bring it on! I'll pit their garage-sale used pitchforks against my Boston Dynamics dancing kill-bot any day.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat