Читать книгу Work Disrupted - Jeff Schwartz - Страница 16

“Are robots really coming for our jobs?” a longtime client asked me in hushed tones, his brow furrowed, his voice filled with anxiety.

His business partner leaned in, reframing his question with another. “Won't new technologies relieve us of all the boring, repetitive tasks so we can focus on more meaningful work?” she suggested in a hopeful tone that quickly grew impatient. “Well, which is it?”

In conversations over the past decade with friends, colleagues, and business leaders about how automation, advanced technologies, and new employment models are transforming the American workplace, the worry has been palpable: “How can we keep up with machines?” they wonder. “What skills do I need to prepare for jobs in 2030?” they ask. “We're going to have a dozen careers, not just one—how's that even possible?” they demand. “I still haven't paid off my student loans for one career.”

The pervasive feeling is that we're standing on the threshold of something powerful, unstoppable, and unknown, much like a giant tidal wave that is going to wash over everything and transform us—how we work, where we work, the work we do, if we work at all. These conversations, more often than not, are characterized by fear. The dizzying advances in robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), digital technology, and new ways of working have created haunting images of a dystopic future world where machines and software can perform most jobs, and human workers are largely unnecessary. Even the acronym FANG, coined in 2013 for the four high-performing tech stocks (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google), contributes to this conflation of technology and monsters.¹⁸

People are most concerned about whether AI will complement human capabilities or act as a substitute. While some predict nothing short of a job apocalypse, other forecasters focus on the vast potential of new technologies to create greater value for workers and to liberate us so we can leverage our uniquely human capabilities—those enduring human skills that smart machines have not yet mastered, such as problem-solving, creative thinking, complex decision-making, empathy, and managing teams. In this scenario, groups of remote and diverse teams work together, people and machines collaborate, and workers continue to be employed because they explore and master new skills and capabilities throughout their lives.

“In medicine, law, finance, retailing, manufacturing, and even scientific discovery, the key to winning the race is not to compete against the machines, but to compete with machines,” observed authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in 2012.¹⁹ MIT's Thomas Malone calls the remarkable power of people and computers working together “superminds.”²⁰ From finding new cures for diseases to designing new tools and systems that will create new products and new lines of business, the promise of AI and humans working together may be the future.

In the midst of these dramatically different depictions of the future of work—a robot apocalypse versus humanity unleashed—many seek to understand what is different from other periods of great technological advances, where do they fit in, and how can they navigate this landscape without signposts so they can continue to work. For all the hype and headlines about the future of work, guidance on how people can find their way is in short supply. My aim is to provide that guidance.

Innovation and experimentation will continue to be lifelines as we transition to a very different world.