A Cabot & you!

There is no reason and no way that a human mind can keep up with an artificial intelligence machine by 2035.

Gray Scott 

As human march on through their daily chores, leaving most in exhausted incomprehension it is pertinent to ask as to how few or many, understand the changes occurring in the workplace. The industrial revolution, catapulted us from the field to a factory, from blue collar to white collar and brought about changes that were not only far reaching but gave rise to management concepts that took on a life of their own.

Emotions, moods, and attitudes of human began to matter as did their personalities. Psychometric testing spawned a new industry and managing a workforce gave rise to one of the largest bodies of research that we have seen over the last century. Motivating employees is as critical as to leading them and organization culture the good spring in which an organization thrives and grows. These were paradigms cast in stone and seemingly unchangeable.

However, in many parts of the world, robots and Artificial Intelligence are making inroads into the workplace. It is even more perplexing that some of the more populated countries like China and Korea are investing substantively in these areas of automation. Robots come in all sizes and shapes and their complexity grows, even as scientists grapple with getting them to do more and more complex operations, from driving a car, to steering a ship or even performing a medical surgery. It is counterintuitive, that China and not the developed nations are populating their factories, with Robots. China is seeing a rapidly aging population and soon its workforce is going to dip below required levels of manpower. The developed nations have driven themselves out of manufacturing due to the cost of labor.

The military applications of AI guarantee a new arms race, which the United States and China quietly invested. AI’s endless commercial applications assure an equally competitive sprint by major firms. Just imagine countless, robots, sprinting and jumping across rough terrain, blasting away with laser guns. Straight out of a Star Wars fantasy!

Even as we grapple with the idea of having a robot assist us or in other words having collaborative robots or CABOTS, the fear of having super intelligent machines taking over humanity is not far behind and is something that presents an interesting problem. So are subjects like Organization Behaviour, the study of ethics and value systems dead, with the possible advent of CABOTS. While this seems to be a possibility in the distant future, the fact is that machines, robots, and AI are a definitive part of the new paradigm and will most certainly define the manner in which we would look at management science?

Managers who view AI as a kind of colleague will recognize that there’s no need to “race against a machine.” While human judgment is unlikely to be automated, intelligent machines can add enormously to this type of work, assisting in decision support and data-driven simulations as well as search and discovery activities. In fact, 78% of the surveyed managers believe that they will trust the advice of intelligent systems in making business decisions in the future. New key performance indicators will drive ways in which workers adapt to Artificial Intelligence. AI will bring new criteria for success and a changed managerial paradigm: collaboration capabilities, information sharing, experimentation, learning and decision-making effectiveness, and the ability to reach beyond the organization for insights. Mundane and repetitive skills are gone.

A truly cabotised work place, where man and machine share a shared destiny, which I'm sure many humans look to with bated breath!