Automation is designed to help professionals in any niche reach max productivity in least time. But what does that mean for the future of employment?
Since automation has emerged into public consciousness, there’s wide expectation that it will surge up productivity creating room for cutbacks. Automation tools and technologies are finding broad use at companies. The biggest beneficiaries are organizations where employees are leveraging the technology to ramp up output – and get more done than their share of work, allowing employers to run bigger operations with a relatively small staff.
In the recent years, a ton of low-skill, routine tasks have been automated putting many people out of job overnight. Many others face the risk of losing employment because of the growing popularity of the technology.
Jobs like full-service checkout at a grocery store, tax filing, record keeping, and cashier and clerical positions are fast going away. The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates that approximately 9% to 47% of jobs can be replaced with automation as the technology matures.
While automated processes no doubt have benefits – flexibility, and opportunities for cost reduction – the question becomes should everything be automated? Stephen Foskett, president of Tech Field Day, asked this question to the panel at the recent Cloud Field Day Delegate Roundtable.
The panel offered two distinct but opposing views. One set of people that is pro-automation said that technologies like AI and robotics have clear benefits, and are an inevitability. The other group is opposed to wholesale automation and worries that it may create a wide socio-economic imbalance.
“We as technologists, like to automate things, but we tend to forget that there are human beings currently doing those thing, and we don’t really think about the effect on them very much, and we should,” notes Justin Warren, who runs a boutique analyst firm in Melbourne.
Mr. Warren humorously reminds that some things should never be automated, for example being a parent or looking after a pet because they are fun to do.
Mr. Warren belongs to a group of IT insiders that anticipates a mass displacement of select jobs in the years to come.
“Automation has allowed us to feed a lot more people than we ever could before. It enables us to provide people with healthcare and clean drinking water and a whole bunch of fundamental and transformative things,” he notes.
“But we should also be careful about how we do it and the transition from one to the other because sometimes it’s going to put someone out of a job and if we don’t care about those people, they might not care very much about us.”
This dovetails with what economists at Darmouth and MIT found in their research. “Firms do not necessarily take into account the consequences that automation has for their workers. Instead, they tend to focus on the value that automation will bring to the firm and its shareholders,” one of the research co-authors commented.
The socio-economic implication has caught widespread attention, and a debate is raging over how the technology will restructure workforce and impact labor market dynamics.
Ken Nalbone, specialist engineer and tech leader, holds a different opinion. He argues, “Over and over throughout history, every time somebody automates some old job that somebody was doing manually, there’s “luddites” – literally, that’s where the term comes from – that’s going to throw the contraption overboard because they don’t want to be automated out of a job.”
“But the rest of the world needs to make progress as humanity,” he insists. “And this is something that we don’t need humans to do anymore, and why should they? When they could be doing something else more productive or more fulfilling.”
Like Mr. Nalbone, most people support the idea of replacing process-based routine tasks that do not require human-level creativity to be handled by automation.
Jack Poller who is an industry analyst also shares this view. In the specific context of cloud, Poller says that automation is a smarter alternative to recruiting humans for repeat processes.
“Automating routine tasks enables your cloud employees to go and do stuff that provides greater value,” he says. “The other thing is, so much happens in the cloud so quickly that it is virtually impossible for humans to keep up, and that’s what’s driving the desire to automate these tasks because we really don’t want humans involved because of the mistakes they make and what impact that has on the business.”
In multiple scenarios, automation has the potential to stamp out the occurrence of errors by aiding humans in a diverse set of tasks. In software development for example, tools like Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible and Terraform, and automated processes like CI/CD, IaC and automated testing, have proven helpful in checking human errors by putting manual tasks on a set-and-forget mode leading to improved software quality, faster releases and overall reduced cost.
Nevertheless, the decision to use or to not use automation remains supremely tricky because the technology, by design, is not infallible, or unbreakable.
“Automation is certainly not without peril,” reminds Mr. Foskett. “Most automated systems are extremely fragile and have very little quality control or quality assurance. Basically, they just assume they’re going to do it right and when they don’t, everything falls apart. I think all of us have experienced that, and it’s a fun day.”
Automation systems in certain applications have proven unreliable simply because of technological limitations. The National Library of Medicine published a paper that shows with example how sensors designed to sense states in the environment get things wrong due to limited detection capacity, or in-vehicle navigation guides fail to give users right directions because of using outdated information.
Human management of these automation errors offers a sliver of hope and shows how humans and machines can work together to build the future.
There are in fact ways to steer around the possible “technological unemployment” that automation is predicted to cause, but there are conditions.
One way to keep human expertise from losing its value in the face of innovation is upskilling.
“If we get people to embrace the automation to upscale into the automation, I think it pushes the societal element of cloud forward,” opines Jay Cuthrell, influencer and entrepreneur. “Once they’re in the boat, we can all be much much safer in the boat than in the rapids.”
But no matter what, one cannot overlook that “a lot of understanding gets lost when things are automated,” reminds Mr. Foskett.
“What if we allowed ourselves to automate stuff in a slightly different way?” proposed Mr. Warren.
He believes that through mindful and responsible implementation, automation can be prevented from becoming a threat to the livelihoods of the masses. This would entail avoiding extreme automation, slowing down the current pace of automation and understanding what improves the welfare of the people in the organization, and working out ways to deliver the broad benefits of the technology.
When automation is used to amplify processes rather than to ratchet up business profits at the expense of the workers, everybody gains. Skilled crafts and workers do not need to get replaced every time a groundbreaking technology arrives in the market. Humans and machines are not meant to cancel each other out. If the concept of human-automation interaction is understood and leveraged well, the economy can progress from the momentum of technological advancement, and economic well-being of the people is assured.
For more, be sure to watch the full Delegate Roundtable from the recent Cloud Field Day event.
