Workers, Your Robot Overlords Have Arrived.’
Wall Street Journal article headline
“It’s time to stop worrying that robots will take our jobs – and start worrying that they will decide who gets a job.” [i] This is the lead sentence in the above WSJ article. Fear mongering? Or reality? Or, a little of both …
The downside: This is happening in Amazon fulfillment centers. A law firm representing Amazon said in a letter to the National Labor Relations Board:
“Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors.”[ii]
This is where robot problems begin in HR. AI algorithms are getting smart enough to screen work candidates, hire VUCANs, monitor performance, and fire under-performers with little human intervention. Welcome to work dystopia.
The upside: Robotics at the macro scale may have life changing, positive possibilities with automated highways with self-driving electric cars providing more work opportunities. Just think of how your living patterns may profoundly be altered as you live many miles away while driven to work by a robot.
Years ago as an engineer, I used rule-based programs or what were known as expert systems to codify work. My goal was to take repeatable processes that experts were using and come up with rules for replicating their knowledge and decision making into a set of rules. Machines have gone one step further where they can discover patterns and explicitly create programming rules on their own. Machines over the last few years have been getting smarter due to their ability to learn and develop human-like abilities such as Apple’s Siri program.
Work Lesson Earned: Here’s our Future of Work challenge:
“If automation continues at its current pace, 400 million workers around the globe will be displaced by 2030. in spite of the vast economic effects of these changes will bring, will we seize the opportunity to reconceive the very meaning of work”[iii]
[i] ‘Workers, Your Robot Overlords Have Arrived,’ Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2019.
[ii] ‘For Lower Paid Workers, The Robot Overlords Have Arrived’, Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2019.
[iii] ‘Future of Work’, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, October 25, 2017