Holding a job you enjoy, one that engages your enthusiasm, energy and commitment, a job that uses your skills and strengths and provides meaning and fulfilment is the ideal. Studies show that feeling valued at work is linked to wellbeing and performance.
For good employees a sense of purpose – the positivity, excitement, challenge and connection with others – make a job fulfilling job a source of pride.
There’s been much debate, a level of moral panic even, around AI and the potential for wholesale job losses. But before machines replace people, they change the nature of the work they do. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but, we need to look at the interaction between human and AI.
Changing the way we work
An article in The Economist looked at recent studies in this area. In theory, AI will free up time for more interesting tasks; in practice, they seem to have had the opposite effect. A study that looked at the use of robots in industrial settings and the effects on workers found that robots reduced the perceived meaningfulness of jobs across the board, irrespective of age, gender, skills and the type of work.
New technology makes work more fulfilling for some but less so for others. The article cited the introduction of drug-dispensing robots into hospital pharmacies which meant pharmacists found the quality of their jobs had improved because they had more time for patient counselling. But pharmacy assistants were unhappy as their role shrank to loading medicine into the machines.
As the use of AI proliferates we should look at the implications and ramifications of relying on the machine mind and what it means for human expertise.
The human element matters
Often decisions are made by humans and computers working together, and just using AI doesn’t necessarily generate the best results and problems can arise if the technology fails or cannot adapt to changed circumstances.
If we grow so reliant on assistive technology that we neglect skills, expertise and judgement we have to wonder what will happen if we don’t have people qualified to act when the computer needs a human to take over. For those wishing to know more about the peril of relying on assisted technology too much listen to my favourite podcaster, Tim Harford, episode ‘Flying too high: AI and Air France Flight 447’.
AI technologies are displacing humans from certain roles and The Economist says that more than half of executives also believe that machines “will never be able to make the types of intelligent business decisions that managers make.” They are almost certainly wrong, AI is evolving rapidly.
Meaningful work
The issue to address is that machines can make people feel differently about their work. So it matters whether new technologies are introduced in collaboration with employees or imposed from above, and whether they enhance or sap our sense of competence and engagement.
AI can do much diagnostic and analytical work more quickly and, possibly, better than human operatives but it is humans who need to review and use the data to meet the needs of the organization and the organizational context, as well as the challenges and constraints in play and the specific economic and legislative environment they operate within.
Emerging technologies have the potential to reshape the world in which we live and work, AI and machine learning afford enormous potential, for the future. The hope must be that the workforce will be able to focus on more creative and interesting work facilitated by interaction with technology, predicated on a changed relationship with work and the workplace.
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