Opinion Why the shift towards AI scares me as a young IT professional

The world is moving to a place where anything with a higher component of human involvement (and isn’t mass-produced) will be valued much higher. For example, people willingly pay a premium for handmade bags, handicrafts, artisanal homemade loaves of bread, etc.

I remember how at my first job, a year-long stint in Parliament working with MPs, what we call “soft skills” – communications, stakeholder management, critical thinking, creativity etc., – played the most important role. Doing well in the intangible aspects of my work ironically created the most tangible impact, and this has remained the same in most other work I’ve done since.

While such a realisation is comforting, the sheer power such tools hold for hijacking processes of deliberation and discussion concerns me. I noticed first-hand during my two years working at Twitter how some actors would attempt to get something trending or flood a particular handle with replies/tweets containing different variants of similar content to drive up numbers.

These efforts would usually be benign (like expressing grievances towards an official), localised and be thwarted by relevant teams if they were ever to gain pace. The thought that they can now be done more convincingly and at scale worries me both as a young IT professional and a global citizen (imagine a draft legislation for which the government has invited public feedback and inputs on its website). Uncontained, this can disrupt the fundamental structure of participative democracy.

Finally, such a shift also holds the promise of widening divides in our societies. Wholesale shifts driven by advances in AI may exacerbate economic and social inequity. The government in Italy recently earmarked $33 million to enable unemployed citizens to upskill, and also focus on those workers whose jobs are most at risk from the advance of automation and artificial intelligence.

While there’s never a clear-cut answer, I’ve been trying to understand better how I can stay relevant through these transitions as a professional and carve out a career while at it. Maybe I’ll have to lean deeper into the softer aspects of my work — human connection, creativity, communications, etc., while also learning to use these AI platforms and leverage them to improve my job. I am hoping that I won’t be replaced by an AI tool at my workplace, but by a human being better than me at using these tools instead.

The writer, formerly in a public policy role with Parliament and Twitter India, is the founder of Public Policy India and Proficy