The Digital Workers are here With Bruce Morton

In 1989, moviegoers were treated to a sneak preview of the digital age when Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) jumped aboard their modified DeLorean time machine and travelled to the year 2015 in Back to the Future Part II.

Today, director Robert Zemeckis’s vision of 2015 reminds us of portents that have come to pass from another iconic motion picture, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001—such as talking computers that seem a bit too independent for our tastes. In the first Back to the Future sequel, Marty and Doc break the time/space barrier in their flying sports car to visit a world dominated by artificial intelligence. In the 2015 setting, work in all types of services from petrol stations to cafés are delegated to machines, not human beings.

Much of what once seemed a far-off future in both Kubrick’s and Zemeckis’s films has entered the here and now. While flying cars still have a ways to go, the reality encountered by Marty and Doc isn’t so far removed from our own. Whether it’s using a self-service grocery checkout or having a conversation with an automated phone system, we now routinely enjoy, and sometimes get annoyed with, machine-generated services that were once carried out by people. Breakthroughs in robotics, digital matrices, and machine learning have brought us to this point.

The new technology holds all sorts of promise for consumers—flying cars included—but it may be even more significant to employers in the long run. While some workers may be supplanted by machines, the changes will likely generate new work opportunities. This has been true since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Once considered a death knell to labor, automation made many workers’ lives easier even as it prompted others to find new career paths.

Fear of change, however, obscured the potential gains that mechanization might bring. These apprehensions led to sabotage, labor strikes, and violent standoffs between workers and management around the world, such as the Luddite movement in the nineteenth-century textile factories of Great Britain and the early twentieth-century woolen mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts.

We are seeing echoes of these fears as the application of AI invades certain job sectors, including manufacturing and customer service. But mechanization of those types of jobs has been underway for quite some time, and the world of work has still survived. It may fall to employers to convince the public that computers and robots enhanced by machine learning are more beneficial than detrimental. Defining the classes of existing technology might help. The digital worker of the future (which is now, by the way) may be driven by one or more types of “thinking”:

Assisted intelligence automates repetitive, standardized, or time-consuming tasks and provides information. Two examples are price scanners used in stores and GPS navigation programs. Technologies such as lasers and satellites combine with computer databases to do things like locate merchandise price figures and offer directions or road conditions to drivers.

Augmented intelligence makes human and machine collaboration possible in evaluating large amounts of data and facilitating decision-making. Complex, yet efficient, interactions between digital programs and human workers enable enhanced services such as car ride-sharing businesses and in-house manufactured dental crowns.

Autonomous intelligence, in which computers themselves relieve humans of organic cognitive processes, is being developed right now. Robotics advancements are enabling more complex movement, and adaptive technology shows machines how to sort information and learn from it. These next-generation machines will be able to evaluate data, make decisions, and even take action on their own. The corporate earnings previews that appear on Forbes’s website, for instance, are already being generated by algorithms without human involvement. We’ll see further results in things like self-driving vehicles and other innovations that are still to come.

Robotic process automation is software that can be easily programmed to do basic tasks across applications, just as human workers do. It is designed to reduce human employees’ burden of simple, repetitive, tasks, such as retrieving invoices from email and typing the relevant data into forms in a bookkeeping program.

So, what does this mean to business leaders and HR folks looking to build the ideal flexible team? Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, in their great book, The Second Machine Age (W. W. Norton, 2016), forecast that machines may take over as much as 50 percent of certain jobs within the next fifteen years. I believe that companies must consider this development a welcome addition to their competitive arsenal rather than a draw-down of expertise. It’s just one element of organizational readiness—the agile state that businesses will need to maintain in order to quickly adapt to changing conditions, whether regarding the talent pool, supply chain, or market demands.

Author Bio

Bruce Morton is a Workforce Design and Talent Acquisition Expert and author of Redesigning the Way Work Works, available on Amazon

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