Workers with artificial intelligence skills may be able to increase their salaries by up to 40%. A recent investigation into the economic value of skills has found out that the more one skill can be combined with others – AI skills being most easily combined – the more they are worth. Higher levels of “complementarity” lead to a potential increase in salary.
Dr. Fabian Stephany and Ole Teutloff, researchers at the Oxford internet Institute and the Centre of Social Data Science at the University of Copenhagen respectively, included 25,000 workers and 962 skills in their study.
AI skills were found to be economically valuable because of high demand coupled with the fact such abilities are not yet widespread. Its “complementarity” was determined by the number, diversity, and value of skills they can be combined with.
The paper explains how previous methods viewing skills as “interchangeable oversimplified the complexity of human capital, as workers possess a variety of heterogeneous and multidimensional skills that match the demands of different jobs.” Teutloff commented that conceptualism the skills’ relationship as a network allowed them “to show the context dependency of human capital.”
Most notably, the study found a positive correlation between programming language and data science skills and potential wage increases. It found that AI skills, on average, increase worker wages by 21% – the average skill, meanwhile, is estimated to only increase wages by 8%.
Stephany stated: “We find that AI skills – lie natural language processing, programming Python or data analytics are among the most valuable skills in our entire data set because they can be combined with […] other skills in different working domains.”
The three skills with the highest potential wage increase included machine learning skills at 40%, Tensor Flow – a software library for artificial intelligence and machine learning – skills at 30%, and Deep Learning skills at 27%. Natural language processing and data science also had a high economic value.
Commenting on the rise of AI, Dr Stephany stated that “as new tech favours new skills and makes others redundant, the skills gap in Europe widens.” He added: “‘By recognising the value of complementarity, we can better guide [the skills of] workers […] in times of technological change.”
