Category: Technology and its malcontents

I, along with Alan Marshall and Robert Hillard, have a new essay published by Deloitte Insights – The new division of labor: On our evolving relationship with technology. This is the latest in an informal series that looks into how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing work. The other essays (should you be interested) are Cognitive collaboration, Reconstructing work and Reconstructing jobs.

Over the last few essays we’ve argued that humans and AI might both think but they think differently, though in complimentary ways, and if we’re to make the most of these differences we need to approach work differently. This was founded on the realisation that there is no skill – when construed within a task – that is unique to humans. Reconstructing work proposed that rather than thinking about work in terms of products, processes and tasks, it might be more productive to approach human work as a process of discovering what problems need to be solved, with automation doing the problem solving. Reconstructing jobs took this a step further and explored how jobs might change if we’re to make the most of both human and AI-powered machine using this approach, rather than simply using the machine to replace humans.

This new essay, The new division of labour, looks at what is holding us back. It’s common to focus on what’s known as the “skills gap”, the gap between the knowledge and skills the worker has and those required by the new technology. What’s often forgotten is that there’s also an emotional angle. The introduction of the word processor, for example, streamlined the production of business correspondence, but only after managers became comfortable taking on the responsibility of preparing their own correspondence. (And there’s still a few senior managers around who have their emails printed out so that they can draft a reply on the back for their assistant to type.) Social norms and attitudes often need to change before a technology’s full potential can be realised.