AI should help not hinder employees – giving people more time to do the things they are best at

Machines should be used to complement humans, not replace them

We’re getting better at figuring out what artificial intelligence is good at (Getty)

Is artificial intelligence a job creator or a job destroyer? Next year will, I suggest, give us a real feeling as to how AI will change the workplace – and the answer will be mostly good news.

Why next year? Well, start with three stories of recent days. One was that the head of AI at Google, Jerome Pesenti, predicted that the technology will start to hit a wall. His core point is that while AI is very good at doing specific tasks, it cannot replicate human intelligence: “We are very, very far from human intelligence, and there are some criticisms that are valid: it can propagate human biases, it’s not easy to explain, it doesn’t have common sense, it’s more on the level of pattern matching than robust semantic understanding.”

As for hitting a wall, he noted that the amount of power needed to solve broader tasks was making AI uneconomic. He did not quite put it in these terms, but I think his message is that human beings are better and cheaper.