Report, experts suggest AI will simplify, not replace, majority of jobs in New York

Albany — A report by the UK Department of Education found that management consultants and business analysts are most likely to have their jobs taken by artificial intelligence, with manual labor less likely to be affected. But, a recent study of New York City executives and some experts say jobs will be simplified, not replaced…at least in the State of New York.

On Friday CBS6 explored UAlbany’s AI in Complex Systems Lab, and how it’s researching ways to make Artificial Intelligence more effective and reliable. Mahsa Goodarzi is a 2nd year PhD Informational Science student in the program and currently collecting data in a variety of ways, but also has a specific focus in the field.

“I’m looking at fashion recommender systems, and how they actually activate or reinforce biases,” she says. “A lot of people are having difficulty finding the right choices for themselves, like the plus sized community or disability community are struggling a lot.”

So, right now she’s researching language in the code for the AI modules to “pay better attention”, in the effort of being more inclusive and accurate for each individual. Abdullah Canbaz, Assistant Professor in the UAlbany Department of Information Science and Technology, says that human touch is important, and at times needed to keep these generative AI system from providing false information, or as they call it, “hallucinating”.

“You penalize the algorithm by saying ‘this is not right,’ it tweaks and says avoiding that particular mistake previously hasn’t been done, that is called reinforcement learning, that’s a huge part of generative AI models,” he says. “Most of the time we generate new versions of these models, and then we update those don’t do lists…that accumulates over the time, and we create flags around them.”

The study of NYC executives suggests students learning these skills have a bright future, as the Accenture report says 92 percent of NYC AI executives will be hiring AI professionals over the next three years, which includes fields like financial services, health services, energy and natural resources.

“The fear about AI taking the industry and people are losing their jobs…I believe we will see that is evaporating soon because new lines of jobs are coming as well,” Canbaz says. “We need people to operate these machines, we need people understanding AI. We would like to train machines to be able to do repetitive tasks, s we don’t need to do that again…push it on machine, it is able to do it maybe 10 times in a minute, 10 times in an hour, whatever the frequency of the task is, so you can do something else.”

The report, which surveyed 500 executives, says the government’s role in creating AI regulations would be key for the technology to be regarded as trustworthy moving forward, and for consumers to feel comfortable using.

“I think it’s going to be very impactful,” Goodarzi says. “Because I care about making a positive impact on society, and I’m sure every person finds joy in that.”