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• Date: March 12, 2019
• Part of: We Need to Talk About AI Series
• Venue: Informatics Forum Edinburgh Uni
• Organized by: Mari-Liss, Steinar, Anton, ...

People

• Paul Mason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Mason_(journalist)
• James Stewart: http://www.homepages.ed.ac.uk/jkstew/
• Subramanian Ramamoorthy: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/sramamoo/

Talk

Opening: Mari-Liss + Anton

• Fear of automation has been around for a long time: from the Luddites onwards, but most of us still have jobs—so is this time any different?

Subramanian Ramamoorthy

Observation: "When I started working in this 20 years ago, AI was obscure—'this is always going to be the technology of the future'—but that has changed significantly today."

How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?

• Some studies have said up to 50%, but more recent studies claim much lower numbers, like 9% in the US [Arntz, Ziehran and Gregory (2016)]
• True pictures call for nuance: how does it differ across countries, age groups, people in different strata?
• Always hard to know how much of these studies we should believe—Business Week thought computer programmers would be automated "soon" in 2007.
• These kinds of speculations rest upon layers on layers of assumptions, and the future is hard to predict.

Some things we do know: