Social Impact of AI in the Workforce in the Past

In the past, there was not much use for AI in the workplace. However, we went through a similar process during the Industrial Revolution what we are experiencing now with AI becoming incorporated in our workforce. So, we examined the characteristics of industrial revolution and early AI as they brought several social impacts in the past.

The first social impact of industrialization was a change in people’s lifestyle. Before the Industrialization, people only worked in the local surroundings of their homes (Fitzgerald, 2000) either making fabric or farming in the fields. After the Industrialization, people moved to cities to work in places like factories (UN, p.7). Such urbanization influenced people to live a faster, busier life. Similarly, AI also brought a change in people’s lifestyle by accelerating the pace of life. For instance, Microsoft’s AutoCorrect developed in the late 1990s, which scanned a user’s text against dictionary and found the closest matches for any unknown strings of characters (Engber, 2014), helped people to write quickly and accurately.

The second social impact of Industrialization was a change in the nature of work. Whereas the agriculture depended heavily on season and weather, industrial work could be done regardless of weather conditions, and the result was increased labor. AI, on the other hand, helped reduce physical labor by either doing repetitive, simple tasks for workers in factories or helping the disabled in their work environment.

The third social impact of industrialization was a change in the workforce. While the introduction of assembly line created new low-skilled jobs such as assembly line worker and assembly line operator, high-skilled workers such as artisans and craftsman lost their jobs. Likewise, AI created certain jobs such as AI engineers and operators, but also replaced some jobs that required simple, repetitive tasks, such as assembly line workers

 Assembly line before & after AI

 

Reference

Engber, Daniel. "Who Made That Autocorrect." Sunday Magazine 8 June 2014: MM24. Print.

Fitzgerald, Richard D. "The Social Impact of the Industrial Revolution." Science and Its

Times: Understanding the Social Significance of Scientific Discovery. Ed. Josh Lauer
and Neil Schlager. Vol. 4. Detroit: Gale, 2000. 376-381. Global Issues In Context.
Web. 16 Nov. 2015.

Patterns of Urban and Rural Population Growth. Vol. 68. New York: United Nations, 1980.

1-184. Print.