One of the most pressing concerns for those of us in the working world is the effect of automation on job security ? in both blue-collar and white-collar work.

Though more far-out considerations are difficult to predict, many experienced computer science researchers feel reasonably comfortable speaking about AI?s influence in the coming 5-10 years.

With so much potentially unfounded speculation about how automation might influence the nature and demand for human work, I decided to ask six artificial intelligence PhDs about their informed perspectives on how AI might impact the job market in the coming decade. Their answers didn?t share much commonality in terms of industry, but they did share a common thread: The expanded or strengthened use of existing algorithms.

One wide swath of jobs that may be most easily automated are likely to be jobs that involve narrow and repetitive manipulation or assessment of data. Irfan Essa at Georgia Tech focuses his research on machine vision, a domain that has developed markedly in the last 10 years. ?Many fields were AI could be applied have been in ?aggregation mode? for quite some time, and now we?re finally getting to a point of sense-making,? says Essa. Continue Reading >>>>>>