Why aren’t our governments talking about how automation will change society?
After yesterday’s thoughts on the presentation of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot, which points to a world in which automatons replace workers in industrial, blue collar, jobs; today it is time to talk about soft automation, or Robotic Process Automation (RPA): the automation of business processes based on software in the form of “metaphorical robots” and machine learning, which is progressively replacing more and more routine or repetitive tasks in the office or white-collar environment.
An article in Bloomberg, “Software robots are gaining ground in white-collar office world”, describes how the automation of processes through software, by using increasingly simple machine learning tools, is changing the structure of many companies after a pandemic that has prompted a rethink about office work.
How many of the tasks we routinely carry out at work can be done by software? The question is not hypothetical: as software becomes easier to create and its capabilities increase thanks to developments such as language interpretation, we find that tasks historically performed by workers, ranging from market research to financial advice, sales and even programming, are progressively being replaced by executable code.
