Unemployed Artificial Intelligence (AI) experts are as elusive as the abominable snowman of the Himalayas. In fact, in my AI career, which spans more than two decades, I have never met one.
However, in the past year, ever since the media woke up to the amazing world of AI, I have been receiving queries like: since AI is a new thing, will I find a job once I graduate? I’ve never seen an advert for an AI expert, etc.
I don’t blame people for asking these questions. In the past decades, and especially in the past year in my role as a member of the Malta.AI taskforce, I have met thousands of people who might have heard about AI, are probably using it extensively, but have no clue that they’re using it or even what it is. This article is intended to set the record straight.
AI is not a new thing. In fact, we can trace some of its initial concepts throughout the entire history of man, such as the moving statues of ancient Egypt or the mechanical calculator of Leonardo da Vinci.
But the spark that really ignited this field of study happened in the summer of 1956 at a workshop held in Dartmouth, USA.
During that two-month event, computer scientists and mathematicians met to solve the problem of creating intelligent machines. Of course, they did not solve it, however, they did manage to coin the term “Artificial Intelligence”.
They also sowed the seed of the various sub-fields of AI such as machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, problem-solving and many others.
In the following six decades, AI became a field of its own with government and private institutions pumping billions of dollars into AI research. Of course, like any other field of studies, there were huge successes but also epic failures.
The problem with AI is that even though we use it every day, it is hard to recognise it because there is no label which clearly indicates that we are actually using AI.
The rule of thumb is that if the automated process requires some sort of intelligence, then it is most probably an AI system.
If Artificial Intelligence is all around us, why don’t we see explicit jobs for AI experts in Malta?
Imagine, I have automated blinds, the ones where you press a button and they go up or down. That is not AI but simple automation. I press the button and something happens. I had to make a decision and trigger everything.
But if the blinds are connected to a computer system which checks the weather outside, knows if you are at home or not, has learnt your preferences over time and then decides whether to close or open the blinds, then we’re verging towards an intelligent system.
I can find a million and one examples like this where you are using AI in your daily life. When using Google, it’s the AI that is finding the information for you. When you scroll through Facebook, it’s the AI that decides which posts you see.
Some washing machines are now capable of weighing the clothes and deciding on the amount of water to use, some ovens decide the right temperature to cook your food – it is the AI that is making those decisions.
In an air-conditioner with climate control, it is essentially the AI that is constantly adjusting the temperature for you.
If AI is all around us, why don’t we see explicit jobs for AI experts in Malta? The reason is that there are few AI experts worldwide when compared to the huge demand of the industry.
Tecent, a Chinese technology company, claims there are about 300,000 “AI practitioners and researchers” worldwide but millions of roles available for people with these qualifications.
Because of this, companies tend to use umbrella terms for computing jobs such as software developers, data scientists, etc, in order to at least find someone.
They know perfectly well that AI experts are essentially computing experts with an AI specialisation. When companies manage to engage one, they are then used to deal with the most difficult problems which they have, many of which have no apparent solution.
Of course, the pay they get is also directly proportional to the difficulty of the task and our graduates are amongst the most well paid in the industry. The biggest recruiters in our field are the iGaming, fintech, software deve-lopment, education, manufacturing, telecoms, consultancy and government organisations.
In synthesis, the country needs many more AI graduates if we want to reach the ambitious target set by the Prime Minister for Malta to be amongst the top 10 nations in the world with regard to AI.
The Department of AI within the Faculty of ICT at the University of Malta has already experienced a 300 per cent increase in the number of students since last year but we need many more to service our country and to become a global disruptor in the field of AI.
Alexiei Dingli is head, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Malta.