Skynet - Why Does It Always Have To Be About Skynet?

“What is it exactly that you do?” my then 14-year-old daughter asked.

I have always had a hard time with that question. I’ve spent the majority of my career in some aspect of healthcare. But even if you’re working in back office operations, friends and family members assume you can answer about any question: Will my insurance cover this? Should I have this spot on my shoulder looked at? Who’s the best doctor that I can go to? 

If you’re in the healthcare business, you know what I’m talking about.

In this case, I thought I had it figured out. She’s a smart kid (obviously) and it was a chance to prove that I was doing something really cool, despite what she might have thought of my feeble attempts to explain it in the past.

“Well, honey,” I said with more confidence than I should have, “I am working with some new software that allows you to automate boring things that people do. It’s called robotic process automation. We’re one of the first in the United States to use it and it’s going to really change the way business do what they do.” 

“So you’re replacing people with robots? Are you working on Skynet?” 

No kidding. I know it sounds cliched, but that’s what she asked. *Sigh* As life-long movie fan, I was both impressed and deflated at the same time. 

Little did I know how many times that reference was going to come up in conversations over my years working in Intelligent Automation. Doesn’t matter who I talk to, or in what setting, The Terminator persists in people’s memories when you talk about robots. And it’s hard to blame people when a new study seems to come out every month either from academia, industry analysts or a government agency predicting a massive collapse of labor because of new automation tools. In fairness, many of those studies also talk about the new types of jobs that will be created to work with these tools, but the numbers are generally smaller than the predictions of jobs being lost.

What worries many people the most is that we are not talking about the impacts that advances in technology will have to eliminate or make easier physical labor. We have been living through those changes throughout the industrial age. It’s not always been easy. Manufacturing is dramatically different today because of technology than it was when my dad worked on an assembly line for an auto company in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. Many people lost their jobs (including my dad) as companies found new and more efficient ways of doing things. But as technology has eliminated more and more manual labor, people moved into knowledge work. More people were using their heads instead of their hands. More people were working in cube farms than on actual farms. 

Now the news is that technology has advanced enough that knowledge work is at risk, as well. Software can do easier things like moving data from spreadsheets to systems or transacting rules-based scenarios faster, more accurately, and more reliably than people can. Transaction processing speeds and data storage capabilities are at all-time highs and are going exponentially higher at a rapid pace. The promise of machine learning, cognitive computing, and maybe even general artificial intelligence comes closer to reality with each advancement to processors and data lakes.

The truth is, as it always has been, that these advancements will have an impact on the working populace around the world. In the short term, organizations have been helping their associates adapt by cross-training them on new work. The creation of new operational capacity is allowing them to provide even greater value to their clients and shareholders, as well as, provide new opportunity for their associates. But, in the end, there will be some people who will be negatively impacted. 

What I know is that use of these new software tools is the way work is going to be done in future. Guy Kirkwood, Chief Evangelist from UiPath, recently made the statement at a conference that we won’t be talking about robotic process automation within the next couple of years because it will just be taken for granted that enterprises have already adopted it. I’m not going to weigh in on the socio-economic implications of that. Whether you believe that what’s coming is a dystopia or a nirvana is personal for each of us and how we view the world. Interestingly, some who fall on either side of that spectrum share some common beliefs about how we should deal with the changes coming as a society (see Ford’s Rise of the Robots and Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s The Second Machine Age as an example of what I’m talking about).

Where I am left is, as my daughter prepares to go to college next fall, finding myself thinking more and more about what she should expect of this new working world when she graduates. Even more so for my 13-year old son. What I am heartened by is that they are far more comfortable and adaptable to technology than I ever was at their age. But the changes that will impact what they plan to do with their lives will happen even more quickly. It’s those who adapt quickly, and learn to use the technology to augment their own gifts and abilities, that will have the greatest opportunities.  So while I’m not sure I am still very good at explaining what I do, I know I’ve been given the chance to have the crucial conversations with my kids about what the world may be like for them in the very near future. 

My daughter may still not be totally convinced that I am not helping to usher in Skynet, though.

See my ASK AJ video on this topic at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnBuWaA7lCg.

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