Rise of the Machines

There are profound ways in which business and work are becoming automated. Soon they will have to change the name of the department from HR to HRR: Human and Robot Resources.

The rise of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence and other cyborg related workers is changing the fundamental structure of Management, Labor and business. We are moving into a future where many businesses can scale rapidly with non-tangible products and services can be infinitely replicated. Computer programs and algorithms can also perform the interface with customers more efficiently. This trend has profound implications for how we think about work and the nature of value and productivity.

How we relate to automation not only has implications for how we think about business models and operating leverage, but also about how we perceive ourselves and our careers developing over the course of a lifetime. These developments have profound implications for our sense of self worth and how we impute meaning to our lives. Work has kept us out of trouble.

“Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.”

― Voltaire, Candide

Blue collar jobs in manufacturing have been impacted over the recent decades as robotic systems have replaced workers on factory floors and assembly lines. Repetitive tasks represent relatively straightforward processes and lend themselves to automation. Now entire factories are operated by a handful of workers monitoring computer screens. As the leadership guru Warren Bennis predicted: “The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.”

The replacement of manual labor by dexterous programmable machines was the first wave of worker displacement. Worker Displacement 2.0 is now underway as Artificial Intelligence is becoming more widely implemented in practical systems. The virtual personal assistant Siri is a good example of a system that interacts via voice and incorporates language recognition and response. Siri performs tasks by searching and retrieving information and employs a voice activated user interface.

White collar jobs are now being replaced in fields previously thought impervious to the encroachment of automation. Accountants, lawyers, and other professional fields; science and engineering jobs; courts and call centers are all affected. What we choose to train for and how we position ourselves and think of our strengths and skill sets will be tested as we are confronted with continually encroaching prescience of automation and computing power.

It will be our task to recognize, predict, and adapt to this inevitable change. We are going to be tasked with forging productive alliances with new itools and leverage a newly focused understanding of our strengths in fruitful ways. Put differently, our relationship to robots and artificial intelligence, and robots equipped with artificial intelligence will increasingly determine how happy, content, and satisfied we are in the future.

This Brave New World offers opportunities to delegate mundane repetitive tasks and even rule based thinking tasks to machines. Innovative and complementary pairing of machines and humans in hybrid models allows businesses to approach tasks in novel and productive ways. We already recognize that tasks that are difficult for us humans are often easy for machines, and conversely, tasks that are easy for us are often complicated to implement in software and mechanical systems. But I regard this situation as an opportunity to unleash creative and energies.