The Specialist Dispatch #6 : Your co-worker is a bot and maybe that’s good

1

Is there another pandemic within the pandemic?

Let's face it: the COVID-19 pandemic wasn't really easy on anyone. When the pandemic was at its peak in 2020, anxiety and depression increased by a whopping 25%. It exacerbated just how important the need for mental health was and shone a spotlight on how compromised mental health can manifest itself by rearing its ugly head.

It didn't help the workplace either. Sure, many could argue that teleworking becoming the new normal sustained business operations, may have augmented efficiency and allowed for more decentralization, but blurring the line between work life and home life bred its own challenges. Workers everywhere have had their well-being vitiated, with Oracle concluding that 2020 was the most stressful year ever. Folks were at a breaking point, with about 80% of them believing that the pandemic severely affected their mental health, around 40% of them making more flawed decisions and about 90% of them believing that work-related stress is impacting their home lives. A host of people are suffering from work-related toxicity and all of this is whipping up unprecedented levels of anxiety, bitterness, frustration, anger and depression, not to mention the uncertainty of job and financial security. And it certainly doesn't get better when one discovers the growing inculcation of AI and automation.

German philosopher Karl Marx remarked how automation is detrimental to workers. As long as competition exists, companies would invest more and more of their profits into machinery that would cut their costs and throw labourers onto the pavement. The worry was that people would be obsolete. But can technology or your potential bot-colleague be more objective, fair and emotionless? Is that the answer? Sure sounds like it, especially for human workers who are not savvy dealing in office dynamics or just plain introverts.  

Harvard Business Review states that there are more monthly visits to the WebMD network than there are to an actual professional doctor. 60 million disputes among eBay traders are resolved using online dispute resolution than lawyers. In 2014, the US tax authorities received electronic tax returns from almost 50 million people who had used an online-tax preparation software rather than actual human professionals. Labour markets have had a poor performance and computers have already substituted many jobs, like bookkeepers, telephone operators and, now, cashiers. Try calling customer care and you could only dare to hope that you’d talk to a human being. Self-driving seems to have been existent, yet not present for the decade, and the self-driving truck is more or less here. It could displace 1.7 million truckers, according to a White House study done by the Obama Administration with reduced emission and faster ship time. The International Transport Forum believes that by 2025, 1 million heavy truck drivers could lose their jobs and by 2027, McKinsey Global believes that 1.5 million jobs could be lost with 85% automation.

All of that sounds like a premonition: the robots are coming for us. The robots are going to replace us. Machines will run amok and humankind will be obsolete. Well, if you can't join them, beat them.

2

Can AI and automation create productivity the way machines did centuries ago? Are human labourers even needed anymore? 

If businesses want to work efficiently and successfully, they have no other choice but to become better at AI and automation. With this whole new wave of digitization, you’d think it’d be better for companies to just displace their workers and bring in bots. If enterprises want to be antifragile and have an agile mentality, they need to adapt and utilize AI and automation. But according to research, enterprises that automate their operations and lay off their employees would only have short-term productivity gains. The only way there could be long-term productivity gains is if humans work with machines as a team. So how can there be complementing? AI can help human beings to gather information, and crunch data and human beings can be freed up to do more "humane" things which are a bigger priority. 

For example, Amazon deployed bots in its warehouses; this way, its employees can have more complex roles like overseeing those bots and so, potentially risky labour is mitigated, while these workers receive upskilling and first-hand experience with operating state-of-the-art machines. It’s human labour working alongside collaborative industrial robots. This collaborative teamwork is also validated by a bunch of experts: former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, believes that AI would create new jobs and upskilling while former President of the USA, Barack Obama, opined that technology would create better living standards for individuals.

AI could be used for augmenting speed, scalability and operational flexibility. There's already a lingering fear of AI in employees' minds and that fear may only grow. Well, the odds are, bots won’t eliminate the need for human labour. What’s missing from automation is the human element. While it seems that an amalgamation of big data, remarkable algorithms and brute processing power might bulldoze human labour, A.I. cannot and will not replicate human logic, thinking and reasoning. A.I. cannot be empathetic, creative or exercise humane judgement. You still need human beings for healthcare, education and customer support. These are places where empathy, trust-building and other people skills are required, not objective data patterns and statistical analysis. Human beings are needed to analyze complex situations with an emotive lens. But a combination of objective methodology and subjective decision making could make organizations more efficient, productive and profitable. Let’s take the field of accounting: the bots can handle repetitive and monotonous tasks like managing accounts or tracking orders, while human beings can handle tasks like pre-sale or post-sale service. With automation reducing the requirement for administrative skills, soft skills like communication, confidence, motivation and resilience will be sought after even more in this new wave of digitization.

3

What is the future of AI and automation? Where is it all going, based on where it's all been? How can we fruitfully utilize it?

Chatbots are already here, with employees and chatbots teaming up to deliver a robust CX. So, teamwork can clearly have a much broader application. This teamwork could be worth trillions of dollars. According to research, smart automation and AI may contribute about $15 trillion to the global GDP by 2030 and that could generate a whole lot of jobs. The concept of a ‘blended workforce’ is nothing new, but in 2020, the notion evolved, when the human-machine partnership began getting even more footing. This definitely sounds interesting and robotic process automation is gaining more traction, especially in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Yet, if there is a kind of complementary relationship, new questions would arise like, "Will I be more engaged with the company I work for? Will the access to information and streamlining make me more productive? Or am I a canary in a coal mine? Will I just be replaced, once I’ve outlived my usefulness? Do I have to sound the alarm, now that the Robotgeddon is here?" That doubt might be irrational, considering how important the human element is for bots to function well. A combination of human power and bots could deliver exponentially improved value to enterprises and help achieve strategic priorities quicker and more efficiently.

But it doesn’t mean the bots are, outright, in the right. We’ve had a couple of mishaps in the past. Remember Tay, which was Microsoft’s Twitter chatbot? It was meant to be an experiment in conversational understanding. The longer people chat with Tay, the smarter the bot gets and the better it can engage with people through casual and playful conversation. Unfortunately, Tay began to spew racist and misogynistic tweets, in the form of inflammatory and political statements, on Twitter. Sometimes, AI software like Siri and Alexa also have weird and chilling responses and that’s a reminder the human element may be missing. But over time, you’re also able to joke with your assistant and that human element may be getting incorporated? It raises a moral quandary of its own: should AI be allowed to impersonate human beings that much? Could AI replace friends or assistants? Only time will tell.

This is a perfect example to cement the case for why there needs to be a blended workforce. AI can perform a lot of tasks, but human beings need to interpret results and mould AI to be better. Mutually reinforcing skills have to be developed to interact with robots, as opposed to competing skills and that’s the way to keep on keeping on. This is because the blended workplace framework means that machines won’t replace what human labour does, but it may change the nature of human labour. They can extend or augment human capabilities, making the impossible possible and setting new standards for performance and output.

It does make for an interesting paradox, though. AI software makes fewer errors than human beings and creates output more efficiently. That means, hypothetically, bots could raise our children better than we do and train people better than humans do. And yet, people need to build better AI for maintenance, innovation and betterment. So, it keeps going on.

4

Are AI and automation nudging us towards a world of equity?

Will the world fare better for human beings, in terms of their sanity, morale and need for equality, be it gender, race or others? Just like Tay, there have been other gender and racial biases, when it comes to facial recognition applications and evaluations for jobs or loans. It’s possible that AI could eliminate human biases that derail progress in society. They could, potentially, ignore data about gender, race, s*xual orientation and other insignificant factors that could colour objective judgement. But intelligent machines can’t do it on their own. They need help. They need guidance. They need human experts to mould, create and refine these systems to help make the best and optimal choices to drive society ahead. Diversity and inclusion can be incorporated into AI design for engaging with the public effectively and fairly.

If automation creates more productivity, then the average working week hours may get reduced, but that ought not to reduce wages or salary. If it did that, then females would be disproportionately affected. But if wages stay the same or increase while work hours reduce, then this has the potential to create equality. Even when it comes to unpaid labour at home, innovative ideas could be used to create domestic arrangements. This way, earning and caring gets distributed between partners.

5

So is there a downside to AI? Is this all going to come crashing down?

The World Economic Forum believes that a new generation of smart machines, fuelled by rapid advances in AI and robotics, would potentially replace a large proportion of existing human jobs. If job losses do happen, and these usually affect women disproportionately, then robust upskilling and reskilling initiatives need to be implemented to make workplaces more ambitious and inclusive. 

According to Bloomberg, more than 120 million workers globally would need retraining due to AI and automation’s impact on human labour. And if automation creates increasing equality within societies to entrench the divide between the poor and the rich, then there would need to be some redistribution of wealth to benefit society. A Democrat nominee for the US Presidential Election 2020 Andrew Yang proposed a solution of a universal basic income, terming it a Freedom Dividend to combat the deleterious effects of AI and automation. Theoretically, this could fund upskilling and reskilling initiatives to augment people’s role in society and better their lives.

Let’s face it: the COVID-19 pandemic did a real number on the global economy. We’re all still convalescing. Countries are already living in broken systems with flailing arms of unemployment, health care troubles, weak education systems, depression, unaffordable and opaque standards of living and inefficient bureaucracy. Technology has forced us to show our hand. But a look at what’s being developed today and the potential of these new powerful machines yields an optimistic view of the future. Ultimately, AI and automation could create that idyllic and utopic world we wish to live in, with collaborative efforts with human beings.

If you didn’t like the intricacies of this piece, didn’t like the narrative or discovered some logical fallacies, let it go. It was written by a human being. Who knows? Maybe, a robot would have written it better.