Though artificial intelligence systems are already becoming a part of daily life, recent debates about AI and the future of work have gained a sense of urgency. The late Stephen Hawking worried that humans “couldn’t compete, and would be superseded” by machines, while Tesla founder Elon Musk has suggested that competition in AI could lead to World War III. The Economist reported earlier this year that nearly half of the jobs in 32 developed countries surveyed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) were vulnerable to automation, declaring, “a wave of automation anxiety has hit the West.”
Ken Goldberg, professor and department chair of industrial engineering and operations research at UC Berkeley, is pushing back on all of that. Instead of embracing the notion that robots will surpass humans and replace us in the workforce (a concept referred to as “singularity”), he argues for “multiplicity” — a hybrid view of how new technologies and people might work in partnership toward human goals. To an extent, he says, this is how AI is already starting to function.