Courtesy of Mish.
Businesses Moving Too Quickly?
Are businesses are moving too quickly to robots? Is any job safe?
Patrick Thibodeau at Computer World discusses the idea things are moving “too fast” with a review of Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Glass Cage, Automation and Us.
Please consider Automation Could Take Your Skills — and Your Job by Patrick Thibodeau.
The Glass Cage examines the possibility that businesses are moving too quickly to automate white collar jobs, sophisticated tasks and mental work, and are increasingly reliant on automated decision-making and predictive analytics. It warns of the potential de-skilling of the workforce, including software developers, as larger shares of work processes are turned over to machines.
This book is not a defense of Luddites. It’s a well-anchored examination of the consequences and impact about deploying systems designed to replace us.
Interview with Carr
Thibodeau posted a lengthy set of interview questions in regards to the book, along with answers from Carr.
Here are a few snips (emphasis added).
CW: What is the worry here? If I can get into my self-driving car in the morning, I can sit back and work on other things.
Carr: There are two worries. One is practical and the other is philosophical. We have to figure out how to best balance the responsibilities between the human expert or professional and computer. I think we’re going down the wrong path right now. We’re too quick to hand over too much responsibility to the computer and what that ends up doing is leaving the expert or professional in a kind of a passive role: looking at monitors, following templates, entering data. The problem, and we see it with pilots and doctors, is when the computer fails, when either the technology breaks down, or the computer comes up against some situation that it hasn’t been programmed to handle, then the human being has to jump back in take control, and too often we have allowed the human expert skills to get rusty and their situational awareness to fade away and so they make mistakes. At the practical level, we can be smarter and wiser about how we go about automating and make sure that we keep the human engaged.
Then we have the philosophical side, what are human beings for? What gives meaning to our lives and fulfills us? And it turns out that it is usually doing hard work in the real world, grappling with hard challenges, overcoming them, expanding our talents, engaging with difficult situations. Unfortunately, that is the kind of effort that software programmers, for good reasons of their own, seek to alleviate today.
CW: Gartner recently came out with a prediction that in approximately 10 years about one third of all the jobs that exist today will be replaced by some form of automation. That could be an over-the-top prediction or not. But when you think about the job market going forward, what kind of impact do you see automation having? …
