AI Battle Royale: How to Protect Your Job from Disruption in the 4th Industrial Revolution (Copernicus Books)

AI, Big Data and other 4 th industrial revolution technologies are poised to wreak havoc in virtually every industry, unlocking huge productivity gains via automation of labor both manual and cognitive. Less discussed are the impacts on workers, who see the value of their skills erode, along with the menace of mass structural unemployment. How can workers assess their vulnerabilities? What can they do to improve their prospects, effective immediately? In this book, you will learn how to: - Survey new tech and decrypt their potential impacts on work - Assess your strengths and weaknesses in the face of AI, the shared economy, and other tech-propelled threats - Foment a battle plan to survive and thrive Ashley Recanati provides guidance for employees to rise above their peers and preserve their value, in a book that will interest managers and scholars, but foremost destined to ordinary workers. Acknowledgments Contents About the Author Abbreviations 1 Introduction Part I Context 2 Future 2.1 Massive Unemployment 2.2 Universal Basic Income (UBI) 2.3 Unemployment with Too Many Vacancies: The Skills Mismatch Scenario 2.4 Workless or Work Less? 2.5 The Tricky Case of Demographics 2.6 A Fourth Sector? 2.7 Wealth Redistribution: Toward a Dystopia Conclusion of the Chapter 3 Past 3.1 1IR: Coal and Steel 3.2 2IR: And Let There Be Light for All 3.3 3IR: The ICT Trap 4 Tech 4.1 Tech Traits 4.1.1 Acceleration 4.1.2 Convergence 4.1.3 Ecosystems 4.1.4 User-Friendliness and Democratization 4.1.5 Internet Waves 4.2 4IR Tech Overview 4.3 3D Printing 4.4 AR and VR 4.5 AI, Big Data, and IoT Part II Work, Disrupted 5 Sectorial and Corporate Disruption 5.1 Sectorial Disruption 5.2 Corporate Disruption 6 Job Disruption 6.1 Organic and Non-Organic Replacement 6.2 A Protean Threat to Work: the 3 Types of Job Disruption 6.2.1 Full Automation/Substitution 6.2.2 The Threat from the Bottom—Skills Downgrading 6.2.3 The Threat from the Top—Skills Enhancement 6.3 The Source of Job Replacement 6.3.1 Outsourcing 6.3.2 Offshoring 6.3.3 Outsourcing to the Customer 6.4 The Job SWOT 6.4.1 Structure and Cognition 6.4.2 Task Dispersion: Taylorism and Narrow AI Versus Transdisciplinarity 6.4.3 Dexterity, Pattern Recognition, and the Moravec Paradox 6.4.4 The Human Touch 6.4.5 IT Versatility 6.4.6 Economics and Scalability 6.4.7 Demographics 6.4.8 Legal and Political 6.4.9 Sociocultural 6.5 Job Vulnerability to Automation 6.5.1 A Fresh Look at US Jobs 6.5.2 Job Vulnerability Canvass 7 Tasks 7.1 Self-assessment 7.2 Step A as Automate 7.3 Step B: Delegate 7.4 Step C as Cognitive: Strive for Human Value-Added Tasks 8 Other Weapons 8.1 Efficiency in Human Tasks that Are Here to Stay 8.2 Learning Curve 8.3 Leveraging Automation Tools 8.4 Stay Social 8.5 Spreading Your Eggs—Entrepreneurial Aspirations 9 Conclusion Appendix A: U.S. Job Openings in 2021 Appendix B: Vertical Waterfall Chart by Minor Job Categories Appendix C: U.S. Sales Jobs by Detailed Category, 2000 and 2018 Appendix D: Big Tech (GAFAM) Versus Rest of the U.S.—Sales, Headcount and R&D Spending Appendix E: African Countries, Weighted by Population Size Under 25 Years Old, as of 2019 Appendix F: 2019 GDP per Capita in USD, 2000–2019 GDP per Capita Growth, for Countries with a population size above 30 Million as of 2019 Appendix G: Full Page View of Job Classification with Traits Glossary Bibliography Index