The difference between automating individual tasks and replacing entire professions explains why many predictions about AI have missed the mark.
Róbert Chovanculiak is an INESS analyst.
There is no shortage of confident predictions online about how AI will trigger a major wave of layoffs. The professions said to be most at risk are those that leave behind digital traces. These traces can be collected, turned into large databases and then used to train AI models to identify patterns and generate their own digital outputs. By this logic, AI is expected to push the original creators of those digital traces – programmers, lawyers, accountants or radiologists – out of the labour market.
The latter are among the professions in medicine most frequently cited as being vulnerable to replacement by AI. There is a vast amount of radiology data in the form of digital images; fundamentally, this is a task based on pattern recognition, and there is also clear feedback for model training. In retrospect, we can determine which diagnoses were correct and where mistakes were made. AI, in other words, “feels at home” in such an environment.
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