‘While many publications and pundits engage in wild, rampant speculation about the impact of AI and automation on work, we decided to take it a step further.’ How? By collecting rampant speculations of others? ‘According to our research, only 3% of workers and 6% of business leaders believe their roles can be completely automated.’ — that’s all speculative. Asking people their opinion on ‘what automation might do to their job’ isn’t ‘getting real answers’ — it’s asking people to speculate over what might be.
I think the article is overly optimistic when stating that ‘Automation will save workers […] more sustainable work-life balance.’ That is just wishful thinking. How about when a company needs half the employees to do the same jobs and simply fires the other half?
For this transition to go smoothly you either need a strong government or well-developed CSR (or conscious capitalism, however you want to call it), that ensures that the everybody benefits from the explosive growth of productivity. To think that ‘workers will be able to focus on their core tasks and have the flexibility to spend less time on commuting and paperwork, and more time with their families’ (without actually losing their jobs) is, in my humble opinion, naive at best.
