Interview Assessments

Name of Professional: Rajni Goyal

 

Profession: Artificial Intelligence Scientist

 

Business/Company Name: Radha Govind Dham

 

Date of Interview: 11/6/2020

 

Mrs. Goyal is a very experienced artificial intelligence analyst/scientist and she works in the Radha Govind Dham Temple as a teacher and also has a profession as an AI analyst where she tracks the cost of energy. She has immigrated to the US from India, and after completing her Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, she came to Texas and attended the University of Texas at Dallas to earn her Master’s Degree. As a teacher in the Radha Govind Temple, she teaches classes to students in machine learning - both specified and unspecified - and even provides internships. In her main career, she predicts the cost of energy usage, whether that be solar energy, electricity, etc. Her main role in the company is to use machine learning to come up with an accurate prediction of the usage rate and price of energy. 

 

Going into this interview, I mainly wanted to find out more diverse uses of Artificial Intelligence. In my prior interview with Mr. Pareek, I learned a lot about the expansive domain of AI and how it is continually growing.. In this interview, rather than learning about AI, I learned more about how it will impact our future in terms of jobs and technology. I learned that AI is continuing to expand exponentially and as a result of this, there will be a transfer of jobs from human to machine. This is a tough reality that many people will have to adjust to as companies will begin transferring many of their jobs from man to machine. Up until this point in time, the jobs that we have seen go away have mainly been physical labor jobs such as cleaning and construction, etc. However, as technology continues to develop, we will continue to see more and more sectors of occupations being given to AI machines. An example of a job that is not physically laborious that has been going through a phase of AI involvement is the stockbroker position. The stockbroker has seen a decline in many ways, the most prominent being independent organizations such as Robinhood becoming a popular resource, including artificial intelligence. AI has taken over this job in an indirect way, however. Stockbrokers rely on people investing in the market and going to them for information on the stock, however, with machine learning, people are more capable of doing their own research so that they may buy a stock. 

 

Throughout the course of the next decade, we will see more jobs that are non laborious being replaced with AI. However, that does not entail a net loss of jobs, as many people are led to believe. I was one of these people until I sat down for a conversation with Mrs. Goyal. She elaborated on the workforce and AI and explained that even if a job goes away in a certain part of the workforce (data, medical, physical) as a result of technology, another job will emerge in another industry. As a society, we aren’t becoming consumed and completely taken over by technology, rather we are letting technology free up some of the work that we have to do so that we can further push our own development in the workforce. In other words, let’s say a job in car manufacturing goes away as a result of technology, another job along the workforce will emerge, whether that be coding these robots to create cars, etc. We aren’t moving backward, in actuality, we are pushing ourselves down the evolutionary timeline which will help us develop as a species. In reality, it’s a good thing that we can push some of our work onto machines and technology as that just makes our lives easier, as said by Mrs. Goyal. 

 

I was very astonished by this detailed explanation of the development of our species. As I said earlier, I was under the impression that technology would contribute to the net loss of human jobs, however, the explanation that Mrs. Goyal gave convinced me that the skill required to become a member of the workforce is increasing. 

 

That day, Mrs. Goyal also offered me a course in artificial intelligence that would go through the basics of artificial intelligence, coding languages such as R+ and Python, unspecified and specified machine learning, along with an internship within the field of AI. I’ve decided to pursue this opportunity in hopes that I can gain a good understanding of AI before I take courses in college. 

 

Throughout the process of interviewing Mrs. Goyal, I also had the opportunity to inquire more about her line of work. As I’ve said previously, she uses machine learning to calculate the cost of the usage of certain types of energy. Right from the beginning, I recognized the versatility of the field of AI as it can be used in the technology sector, the financial sector as well as the energy sector. Something that caught my attention was when she said that coding was not a large part of her job or any AI worker’s job. This was surprising to me as I’d always thought that coding was a massive part of the line of work, although this may hold true for the technology and engineering sectors, it is still nonetheless a surprise to me. The way she calculates costs is by using a regression analysis form of machine learning which is used by many mathematicians. She did not have the time to explain all of the details in such a limited amount of time, but from what she explained, there are certain units and figures that are provided to the company, and the AI employees use these figures and plug them into their machine algorithms to help predict the total cost of energy for the month or designated time period. The variables may include times of usage, amount of time used, weather/sunlight, and many others. This just shows how complex of a job this is and there are many components that factor into creating a successful method to predict costs, especially when human interaction is involved.

 

I greatly appreciate Mrs. Goyal for agreeing to speak with me as I learned a lot from this interview, in terms of the future of the workforce along with the details of her job. I’ve got a lot to consider as to the future of my career and where I’d like to focus my thinking. I will continue to schedule more interviews with professionals in order to further develop my understanding of the field.