Robots. AI. The jobs of the future. This week’s curator Christine Overby looks at the frontier of human and machine co-working.
The Robots are coming.
@christine What’s your big win for the week? This is the first question that I hear every Thursday morning. It doesn’t come from any of my co-workers. It comes from standup-bot, our friendly digital task-master that we built using Slack’s Howdy. We use the bot to collect weekly status reports on product development and billable work. It saves us time when compared to traditional update meetings. Yet while we use it for algorithmic management (of the admin kind), I’d never think of it as my algorithmic manager. Maybe that’s just me. The UK Chairman of EY recently told the Financial Times that graduate recruitment of auditors and accountants could fall by as much as 50% by 2020 due to the impact of artificial intelligence. And The World Economic Forum just published a report that predicted robots will take 5 million existing jobs. It also predicted that they will create 2 million new ones. Clearly, the future of work isn’t binary. Robots will create technological unemployment. But also consider the transformation. Technology helps us unbundle the activities that make up our jobs. Senior people can delegate tasks previously only tackled by experts. Junior professionals get to do more satisfying, less mind-numbing work. As both futures play out in parallel, the most helpful advice that we can give is to look at your connectedness to machine intelligence as a new super-power. How can you use the robots to accelerate decision making, rethink job descriptions, and ultimately, unlock a broader spectrum of capacity in your company?
Weekly Linklog
- World Economic Forum prediction: robots to take 5 million existing jobs – create 2 million new ones. The jobs of the future | World Economic Forum | WWW.WEFORUM.ORG
- We have reached a point where a combination of machine learning and human curation connected by a meaningful user experience has the potential to reshape discovery in the enterprise. Augmenting Human Intelligence | WWW.TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM
- In the gig economy, companies such as Uber and Deliveroo manage workers via their phones. But is this liberating or exploitative? The story behind UberEats, courier protests, and how people organise a strike when they don’t know their co-workers (Algorithmic management, meet algorithmic rebellion). When your boss is an Algorithm | WWW.FT.COM
- Get ready for the most sweeping business change since the Industrial Revolution – where every company is a math house and every executive must understand their role in leading this type of business. The algorithmic CEO | FORTUNE.COM
- Get used to talking to businesses like you talk to your friends. Chat Bots Aren’t a Fad. They’re a Revolution. | BACKCHANNEL.COM
Join us at our “Reimagine the Firm” event (18 Oct)
How do you prepare for the arrival of artificial intelligence, data analytics, and new roles in the legal and accounting professions? On 18 October at RPC’s London offices, Post*Shift will host an exclusive breakfast event focusing on the future of the firm. We’re planning a thought-provoking discussion on new labour model that minimise fixed costs and over-capacity through human and machine co-working. All attendees will receive a customised benchmark report, showing your organisation’s transformation maturity and tailored recommendations for advancing it. You can register at “Reimagine The Firm: From Platforms To Pyramids” (no consultants, please).
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