The Drucker Forum is taking place this weekend in Europe, and I’m writing a series of posts reviewing some of the thought pieces that the various speakers provided in advance through the Harvard Business Review blogs or the forum site itself. Next up is Liviu Nedelescu’s “We should want robots to take some jobs“.
His article is prompted by the dominant theory that robots are taking higher and higher-level jobs, gobbling them up faster than industry is creating other jobs, leading to stagnation of median income and growth of inequality. Not to mention the fears of creating a future AI singularity that will replace mankind.
In a more hopeful vein, the article reviews other discussions that point to alternative paradigms like the fact that task-oriented economies tend to devalue humans, but robots can free us from that to focus on open-ended, creative activities with leaps of logic in innovation and thinking that we are more suited to accomplish.
I am not as confident that “In the 21st century, creating meaning and innovating will be democratized through technology.” But the idea that “effectiveness should be a human pursuit, while efficiency should be delegated to machines” is a strangely compelling argument. A good piece, and I will be interested to see if they publish more of his papers on the site.
