Growing Automation

I have a mixed feeling toward automation and its impact on the future of a lot of business. Lots of teams around the world are working toward full automation and I can’t stop but wonder what can happen if you scale this automation more and more.

While not being a Luddite, I’m wondering until which point we can downsize human teams by improving automation, this leading automatically to less and less available jobs.

While we are working toward a more automated world, relying on both IA and strong systems, I feel our politic systems and the way we envision our lives don’t move at all at the same pace. While there were several attempts and tests about an universal income, those learnings don’t see to infuse as the majority of people are stuck in a mentality of « we shouldn’t pay others to do nothing » and our politics, instead of being able to plan for the future, are more and more stuck in a shortest and shortest vision, aiming only for the next election.

I wonder what will be the breaking point between this global movement toward automation and its impact.

At the same time I think a lot of executives are fantasising about what automation can really bring and how much they can get on without humans interacting and solving the quirks. As a species we are quite specialised in edge cases and we too often tend to imagine that working on a « default » system will be sufficient.

This quick evolutions doesn’t lead per se to a shortage of jobs but increase the agility needed to work, as every month brings more and more things to learn, areas to evolve in and competencies to get.

Too often I feel we are building a world that move more quickly than we of our systems are able to follow and I wonder how long we can wait before we collectively need to increase our pace, at the cost of leaving a lot of us behind.