Assuring Sustainable Employment Through Smarter Automation

Assuring Sustainable Employment Through Smarter Automation – Part One

By The Fatty Fish Editorial Team - January 14, 2022

Job automation is often misunderstood and mischaracterized as “a job killer,” but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, automation — and particularly smart automation — can help create more sustainable employment, improve productivity, minimize risk, and in many cases even create entirely new categories of jobs.

Before we dive into healthy models of smart automation, let’s address the elephant in the room: Yes, job automation can and will replace some jobs. We know that any job that can legitimately be done by a machine at a lower cost and/or resulting in more output, is likely to be automated. In the past, the types of jobs that were often lost to automation consisted of performing simple repetitive tasks: the hole puncher on an assembly line, for example.

As time went on, and task automation began to scale across industrial and agricultural environments, entire chains of tasks became increasingly automated, from materials sorting, forming, assembly, packaging, shipping, and tracking. In agricultural settings, self-driving vehicles can now seed, water, and harvest fields at scale. As new automation solutions drove the industrial revolution through its paces, millions of now obsolete jobs were eliminated. This is true. But the part that we hear less about however, is that for every job lost, a new kind of job was created somewhere else.Think about career fields that exist today as a result of technological advances: IT and system analysis, for starters, but also network engineering digital marketing, logistics, database management, STEM fields, and so on.

The challenge of automation therefore isn’t net job loss, but rather, worker displacement. Taking that insight a step further, we realize that the real economic challenge posed by job automation isn’t just vague worker displacement but rather, and more specifically, the duration of that displacement: By reframing the problem in this way, we are presented with its solution: If and when automation does, in fact, cost someone their job, the friction point isn’t the inevitable obsolescence of the job being automated, but rather the ability to retrain and retask each human worker whose job has rudely come to be automated. This particular endeavor generally requires a complex matrix of public-private partnerships so as to coordinate the funding, resource allocation, and on-ramp/off-ramp pieces of that efficiency puzzle at scale. We will circle back to this complicated aspect of the job automation paradigm at a later time. Just know that a job lost to automation can often result in a career transition to a higher-paying, more fulfilling job for workers who can be agile with their adaptation.

For now, however, let’s focus on how smart automation can help boost and sustain employment. A good place to start this discussion is at the intersection of job automation and task automation. Automation generally focuses on tasks, not jobs, unless a job consists of a single repetitive task, or a series of repetitive tasks. The more complex the job, and the more unique tasks it requires, the more difficult it becomes to automate. What this teaches us is that, for jobs with high levels of operational complexity, smart automation may be more useful as productivity enhancement than as a scheme to replace a human worker.

For instance, smart automation can help boost an information worker’s productivity if it is applied to low-value, time-consuming tasks like search, filing reports, responding to emails, calendar management, data analysis, report drafting, and so on. The principal benefit of this smart automation model, in which automation technology assists and enhances human workers instead of replacing them, is that it frees them to focus on high-value tasks while it handles tasks that can and should be automated.

In this model, smart automation enhances human workers by not only increasing their overall productivity but by also likely improving outcomes and other high-value KPIs. Think of the time saved, for example, through the use of virtual and digital assistants, as well as other forms of smart automation, to handle keyword and topic searches, automatically file reports and paperwork, proofread briefs, prioritize email alerts, respond to incoming messages, scan resumes, translate documents, sift through press releases and news reports, screen calls, manage orders, expedite shipments, schedule meetings, automate team schedules, quickly create presentation and reports, autofill documents, analyze data and KPIs, test hypothetical scenarios, accelerate prototyping through virtualization, and so on.

Another aspect of smart automation’s potential to enhance human workers that is often missed is its ability to minimize risk, both for workers and organizations at large. At a very high level, smart automation in the form of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence applications can be applied to market analysis, data and trend analysis, predictive analytics, forecasting, and SWOT analysis. This automated enhancement, when combined with human insight and decision-making, can help identify potential opportunities and threats for decision-makers, and de-risk complex decision-making. On a more everyday operational level, smart automation can also help facilities managers, IT managers, and line employees anticipate, detect, identify, and mitigate physical and virtual threats ranging from weather events and impending system failures to PR blunders and malicious cyberattacks either before disaster strikes or as soon as it does.

All of this to say that smart automation can, when used judiciously, help boost productivity, improve outcomes, and minimize risk for human workers and the organizations they serve. This human-machine partnership model of smart automation, in which smart automation is leveraged to enhance human capabilities rather than as a scheme to replace human workers outright, carries immense potential for organizations, as enhancing workers with smart technology solutions will be likely far more beneficial than attempting to replace them with automation. Because of the layers of operational enhancements it brings to organizations, this model may hold the key to delivering a more sustainable model of employment for human workers, so long as they are capable of adapting to this new technology-enhanced work environment.

Innovation in the field of smart automation should therefore not be seen through a lens of human vs machine competition, in which investments in smart automation will result in negative employment outcomes, but rather through a lens of human-machine partnerships and/or human-machine enhancements with the potential of assuring sustainable employment, both in the short and long term.

The Fatty Fish Editorial Team

The Fatty Fish Editorial Team includes a diverse group of industry analysts, researchers, and advisors who spend most of their days diving into the most important topics impacting the future of the technology sector. Our team focuses on the potential impact of tech-related IP policy, legislation, regulation, and litigation, along with critical global and geostrategic trends — and delivers content that makes it easier for journalists, lobbyists, and policy makers to understand these issues.