A year ago, a report by the management consulting firm McKinsey concluded that, in 60 percent of occupations worldwide, at least one-third of activities could be automated. Between 400 million to 800 million people could be displaced by automation in the next 12 years, according to McKinsey.
Intelligence analysts will be among the unemployed unless they adapt to the new world of “sense-making” wrought by artificial intelligence, says Zacharey Tyson Brown, in War on the Rocks.
“Intelligence analysts who primarily perform the time-intensive and error-prone task of what one professor at the National Intelligence University calls “data sifting,” — think editing spreadsheets and writing situation reports — are indeed likely to be replaced by AI in the next few years. ”
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The original model of the CIA analysis resembled the industrial assembly line, Brown notes. This model is doomed, he says.
“As artificial intelligence (AI) expert Kai-Fu Lee puts it: “Much of today’s white-collar workforce is paid to take in and process information, and then make recommendations based on that information — which is precisely what AI algorithms do best.”
The value proposition of intelligence analysis in an age when algorithms make recommendations in milliseconds is “sense-making, Brown argues. This , he says, is the “process through which organizations understand the world. Organizational understanding emerges from the collaboration of all parties involved — collectors, analysts, algorithms, and the consumers themselves.”
Intelligence analysts can only save their jobs by reconceiving their work.
Professionals in the private sector are replacing the dead metaphors of the past — verbs like produce or deliver — with present participles like servicing, sharing, filtering, cognifying, and brokering, all of which imply continuous action rather than a linear process. Intelligence analysts should no longer think of themselves as building a product — AI can do that. Instead, they should recognize that they provide a service.
Brown, a U.S. Army veteran with a master’s degree in strategic intelligence, is optimistic that U.S. intelligence agencies can make this transition. But his reporting does not convince me that intelligence analysts won’t be thrown out of work. Policymakers and military commanders will always need sense-making, but with AI its going to take a lot fewer people to do it.
