To navigate successfully future uses of artificial intelligence in healthcare, providers and policymakers must address education, skills development, and workplace culture. 

That’s according to a new report from the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, which goes onto point out that, in contrast to early predictions about automation, AI, and the workforce, projections about the future of technology now seem to view these tools as both beneficial and disruptive.

“Technologists at first issued scary dystopian alarms about the power of automation, including AI, to destroy work,” the report said.  “Now, the discourse appears to be arriving at a more balanced story that suggests that while the robots are coming, they will bring neither an apocalypse nor utopia, but instead both benefits and stress alike.”

According to the report, over the next few decades, approximately 25 percent of US jobs will experience high exposure to automation, but more than 60 percent of jobs will only see mid-level or low disruption. Jobs in any industry that requiring a bachelor’s degree or more will have an automation potential of just 24 percent, while jobs that require less than a bachelor’s degree have an automation potential of 55 percent.

As for healthcare, the report said the industry has an automation potential of 36 percent, with healthcare practitioners and technical occupations seeing an automation potential of 33 percent over the next few decades.

While AI and automation may not end up causing radical change for the healthcare workforce, the authors noted, some changes will be necessary to succeed in the emerging environment.

“Automation, forever a major determinant of the nature and availability of work, will continue to reshape the work people do and the opportunities they are afforded,” the report said. “While our analysis shows that the next phase of the automation era may not be as dystopian as the most dire voices claim, plenty of people and places will be affected, and much will need to be done to mitigate the coming stresses.”

In view of expected changes, the authors said, academic institutions, as well as healthcare organizations and entities of other industries, will need to take a new approach to learning and skill development.  But first, change will have to take place in healthcare organizations themselves.

“Change will most naturally and urgently begin within companies, where firms and their existing workers will mutually experience the need for skills changes. An important starting point will be to increase the prevalence of employer-led training,” the report said. “Employer-led trainings can improve firm output, enhance workers’ career prospects, and help companies fill emerging critical needs.”

Governments will also have a role in incentivizing on-the-job training and tuition assistance, the authors said, which will facilitate the development of an environment of lifelong learning and skill development.

“AI and automation will likely have many positive impacts on the U.S. economy, despite the uncertainty and disquiet they are currently engendering. The trick is going to be to recall as a nation that technology change doesn’t ‘just happen’, but that it can be shaped,” the report concluded.

“The nation needs to commit to deep-set educational changes, new efforts to help workers and communities adjust to change, and a more serious commitment to reducing hardships for those who are struggling. If the nation can commit to its people in this way, a future full of machines will seem much more tolerable.”