AI and Job Destruction: Another Augmentation Analogy
The Middle Path
Both large corporations and startups alike are becoming increasingly attentive to the ways they can integrate AI into their business. But as we’ve been exploring, many are afraid that AI will be the harbinger of pernicious job destruction. There are a wide range of predictions out there about the magnitude of the expected job destruction from AI. The attitudes regarding this coming change run the gamut, ranging from fairly blasé, to downright terrified. Perhaps the best advice to give amidst all of this turmoil is a point highlighted by Gautama Buddha: when faced with extremes, pursue the “middle path.” Or as the great Oscar Wilde once quipped, “everything in moderation, including moderation.” In other words, the likely outcome is neither an unchanged status quo, nor radical destruction of innumerable jobs. Instead, it is something in between, not job destruction, but job augmentation.
In the previous blogpost we introduced the concept of human augmentation by AI, discussing the analogy of Microsoft Excel augmenting accountants when the software was first introduced. In this blogpost we discuss another analogy relating to AI and augmentation, namely, the exoskeleton.
Superhuman: AI Akin to an Enhancing Exoskeleton
CEO and co-founder of Talla, Rob May, provides an apposite analogy for this topic. May asserts that AI will enhance humans in the workplace in the same way a powered exoskeleton enhances its wearer. Like the exoskeleton, AI will make us stronger, faster, and better at our jobs. It will eliminate the rote and laborious parts of work, freeing us up to be strategic and creative. Rob’s company Talla is certainly on the cutting edge of AI and the enterprise, as it recently became the most well-funded B2B bot company. Having his finger on the pulse of the AI movement, Rob has elected the middle path, acknowledging that just as robotic exoskeletons will one day soon give us super strength, AI will function as an exoskeleton for our minds, transforming us into super employees.
Just as an exoskeleton can turn enhance our athletic prowess, AI can enhance our workplace productivity. Just imagine how much you could get done if you weren’t bogged down by the tedious minutiae at your job. For the IT professional it might be the seemingly endless provision of instructions for conducting a password reset. For an HR employee if might be answering over and over again how many vacation days an employee has left. That’s why Talla has developed an intelligent chatbot to act as an extension of your internal services teams. You can teach Talla to answer these questions for you, even when employees ask the questions in myriad different ways using completely different words. By handling these boring repetitive tasks for you, you’re free to work creatively to tackle the interesting and complex parts of your job that add the most value to your company; in short, you’ve been enhanced.
Conclusion
When put in the context of augmentation, the coming AI revolution seems exciting rather than frightening. What are some of the ways that AI will augment, rather than replace, the workforce? The possibilities seem nearly endless, so in the next few blogposts we will explore the ways in which augmentation by AI is already happening. Following that, we will speculate a little regarding the direction augmentation may head in the near future.
