Human/Machine

Human/Machine, The Future of Our Partnership with Machines, by Daniel Newman and Olivier Blanchard, Kogan Page Inspire 2019 

We've seen the headlnes - assembly workers chased out of jobs by robots, automation takes over product design!, robots work where humans can't, or won't,  etc.  Scare tactics or truth?  When our vision extends to the moving horizon of robotics and machine intelligence, the sky's the limit.  Or is it?

We need an interim guide to look calmly and unemotionally at what machines are doing to our lives - where they make work safer and better, and where we will feel the metallic pinch of out-of-control machine learning.  And as the early atomic sciences experts feared, will managing the new technologies we create be beyond our wetware limits?

Newman and Blanchard cite plenty of exciting examples.  "Our objective is not to paint a rosy picture of the future, but rather to reframe the goals, outcomes and direction that we may wish to keep in mind when making decisions about when, where and how to invest in automation."

Perhaps the most valuable and credible content in Human/Machine is the 10-year digital transformation roadmap.  Among their top 10 predictions, think about these shockers:

    2.  Because smart automation will allow companies to do more with fewer employees...the most vulnerable employment categories will remain most at risk... manufacturing, repetitive administrative functions, accounting, customer service and financial services professions will be among the most at risk of being automated.

    6.  Voice will replace keyboards and typing as the next interface between human and machine.  Gestures, eye-tracking and other types of interfaces notwithstanding, voice and natural language will be the next keyboard.

    8.  The combination of smart objects, ubiquitous AI and voice as the new interface will begin making traditionally analog interfaces like knobs, levers and buttons obsolete.

The second huge contribution Newman and Blanchard make to the human/machine discussion is their use of the word augmentation to replace the idea that machines/robots/AI will own it all.  They do not predict an apocalypse of skilled manual jobs, but rather an erosion of somewhere between one-third and half of all manual jobs combined.  Machine operators and assembly workers are more likely to feel the bite of automation. 

Finally, in addition to the book's believable predictions, the authors' most valuable contribution to this field are their Chapter 8  recommendations on how technology companies should prepare for the next age of human-machine partnerships.

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, pemoody@aol.com, patriciaemoody@gmail.com, tricia@patriciaemoody.com,