July 1, 2020 Author: Matthew Renze

Will AI replace my job?

This is one of the most common questions I get asked regarding the future of AI and employment. However, no matter what career you have, there are things you can do now to prepare for the coming way of AI automation.

There are three main paths, depending upon how deep you want to work with AI technologies in your day-to-day job. We’ll start with the most difficult and work our way down to the easiest and most general path.

Training AI Models

If you want to go deep in the field of AI you can learn to train your own AI models. This typically involves quite a bit of education and experience. However, the field of AI is growing rapidly and there is currently a shortage of people with the skills necessary to train AI models from scratch — this means much higher salaries.

Training AI models typically involves technologies like machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning. There are also several methods for training AI models including training via data sets, training via simulation, and training via demonstration. Each of these technologies and methods has various pros and cons.

Building AI Applications

If you’re already a software developer or IT professional then you might want to consider building AI systems using pre-trained models. There currently exists an assortment of off-the-shelf pre-trained models that can solve a variety of common AI problems. These tasks include image recognition, text analysis, speech synthesis, and more.

To build these systems, you simply use your existing programming skills to wire input to outputs, just like you would do with other software components. While it’s important to have a basic understanding of how these pre-trained models work, you don’t need to have a deep understanding of their inner workings in order to use them effectively.

Using AI Tools

There’s an old saying that “If you can’t beat ’em… join ’em”. This couldn’t be more true with AI. Once an AI tool can perform a part of your job more efficiently than a human, then there is no hope of trying to compete. Machines are simply faster, cheaper, more scalable, and more reliable than humans at some tasks.

Rather than trying to compete against the machine, I strongly recommend that you learn to work with AI instead. You can do this by augmenting your human skills with AI skills. When you leverage AI tools this way, you can become vastly more productive than your non-AI-augmented peers — and this will keep you highly employable as well.

No matter what career path or industry you belong to, there are things you can do today to prepare for the coming AI revolution.

To learn how to upgrade your career for AI, please check out my free online course: Artificial Intelligence: Preparing Your Career for AI

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