This week’s curator, Sam Thomas, shares some links about the growing need for automation and robotics to be designed in a way that complements, rather than just replaces our human skills.

As the capabilities and acceptance of artificial intelligence grow, we are shifting away from the simplistic view that AI will simply make people redundant.

For economists and politicians, the solutions to this growing issue often lie in radical policy proposals such as universal basic income, or so-called ‘robot taxes’, which could potentially break the accepted paradigm that all of us need to work for society to succeed.

But there is also growing interest in how we can work together better by combining our human ingenuity and intelligence with the raw processing power and precision of robotics, so in many areas of work, perhaps we will see some new and creative hybrid roles where people use robots to achieve more than they could alone, in much the same way as we saw the rise of Centaur chess – groups of people using a variety of AIs to achieve the best results. I expect this notion of harmonious, human-centric automation will become increasingly popular and produce some interesting ideas about the relationship between people and technology at work.