The term ‘Turing Test’ – initially labelled as the ‘Imitation Game’ – is the eponymous assessment designed by the prodigious, if rather enigmatic, Alan Turing in 1950. It was designed to gauge ‘a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.'
Retrospectively, the ‘Test’ sparked widespread controversy, with some defenders and many more critics. But it established a whole new area of academic study upon which we base a lot of today’s ‘philosophy of artificial intelligence.’
It is reckoned that the modern era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) started gaining societal traction in 2007, when Apple first released the still-popular iPhone smartphone. Ever since that historic milestone, the ever-increasing transformational power of AI has induced enthusiasm and trepidation, often in equal measures. Modern society is as much in awe of the convenient powers of AI, as it is anxious about what new emulative powers tomorrow may bring.
However, amongst all the key concerns regarding the rising power of modern AI, none appears to hit home more than the prospect of AI ‘taking over our jobs.’
Technological unemployment
It was John Maynard Keynes who, as far back as 1930 (Keynes, John Maynard (1930), Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren) first introduced the designation ‘technological unemployment’ to define the potential of advancements of technology to replace humans in their respective day-to-day professions. Recent gigantic leaps in the areas of digitisation, automation, transformation, process digitalisation and generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, have done little to ally this mounting fear.
A 2023 survey by the renown Boston Consulting Group (BCG), for example, polled 12,000 workers from around the world and reported than around a third of them were concerned that they could suffer ‘job displacement,’ mainly through AI. Front-end employees, relatively more than back-end management, were described to believe that their role may soon become redundant or obsolete, and replaced by AI.
The presence of intelligent and flexible technology in the modern workplace is somewhat inevitable and only makes for a moot argumentation. A recent edition of ‘The Economist’ (Machines Might Not Take Your Job. But They Could Make It Worse, The Economist) put it best, when it described how, “Discussions about artificial intelligence in particular easily get lost in hypothetical debates about wholesale job losses or, worse, the nature of consciousness.”
All such debates would be better served if they focus on the fact that we are consistently expecting companies to remain competitive in the face of a whole spectrum of economic challenges, and consequently one should not pin any blame upon these entities if they now place corporate faith in the productive potential that contemporary AI can provide, rather than provide employees with the false peace of mind with respect to guaranteed job tenure.
I tend to believe that there are two key questions that somewhat conflict me more than many others:
- What is the crucial and relevant skillset necessary within today’s workforce, to maintain a fair degree of workplace relevance, in the face of potential technological unemployment?
- How prepared am I for the potential possibility of someday working in a corporate environment that requires active cooperation with one or more digital and virtual colleagues?
The two questions may initially appear to be distinct and unrelated from each other, but there is a tenuous connection between the two; in the future the necessary workplace competencies will be the ones that paradoxically manage to abandon a sense of threat or competition with the growing potential of AI, but concurrently use and exploit these very same AI capabilities.
The skills of the now
We can rightly acknowledge that jobs that involve tedious and monotonous drudge are already being, if not already have been, rendered obsolete because of transformational AI technology.
Very often, when discussing AI, we tend to emphasise the timesaving, flexibility and agile qualities that this transformational technology has the potential to offer, including such factors as increased quality, productivity and enhanced customer experience.
In this respect, we can acknowledge that human capabilities can rarely, if ever, compete in this wide and generic arena.
However, when we look beyond these capabilities, we ought to realise that AI technology holds the promise of facilitating high-tech, human-centric operations with, however, the promise of enabling employees to focus on tasks that require high-touch, genuinely-human, skills like problem-solving and decision-making rather than time-consuming and effort-intensive grind.
The less fearful amongst us should welcome the prospect of an imminent future in which AI technology is allowed to dominate every minute of the workday, currently taken up with the daily catch-up effort that disheartens us early every Monday morning, and at the start of every other weekday.
And, just like the fabled Trojan Horse, we can stealthily move into a new workplace arena and appropriate such skills as leadership, strategic planning, corporate vision alignment, cognitive planning, using such honed skills as creativity, focused expertise, innovation and 360-degree-thinking.
How ready am I to eat digital birthday cake during the celebrations of a future AI colleague?- Hadrian J Sammut, Head of Advisory Services, iMovo Limited
Good morning digital colleagues
The workplace of the future will consequently be characterised by active synergy between AI applications (i.e. ‘digital employees’) that imitate human behaviour in joint unison with flesh-and-blood skilled workers.
Such a utopian vision is not many years into the future; with a few companies taking this reality towards areas that can, at best, be described as unexpected.
A recent article in the London-based newspaper ‘The Guardian’ (The World is Not Quite Ready for ‘Digital Workers,’ The Guardian) described how Sarah Franklin, the CEO of a Human Resource (HR) organisation called Lattice, announced that as from “[the] 9th July [2024], the company said that it would begin to support digital employees as part of its platform and treat them like any other employee.”
“Today Lattice is making AI history,” Franklin pronounced. “We will be the first to give digital workers official employee records in Lattice. Digital workers will be securely onboarded, trained and assigned goals, performance metrics, appropriate systems access and even a manager. Just as any person would be.”
Admittedly, the online backlash “was enough to force Franklin to suspend her company’s plans three days after her announcement.”
The whole story has, though, left me wondering: “How ready am I to eat digital birthday cake during the celebrations of a future AI colleague?” The jury is still out on this one.
Conclusion
In today’s highly competitive, ever-changing and dynamic digital landscape, business organisations are seeking ever more innovative ways to address the plethora of issues that are having an impact upon their operations.
In a bid to counter such an impact, these organisations are having to embrace an ever-increasing digital and transformational future; one in which AI ‘digital workers’ have a key role to play.
To quote ‘The Economist’ again, ‘… [AI] technologies tend to spread in less dramatic ways, task-by-task rather than role-by-role. Before machines replace individuals, they change the nature of the work they do.’“Good morning my fellow digital workers. I see you have been at work all weekend, unlike me. Pity! You may know the score but cannot appreciate the sheer pleasure of that Leeds game last Saturday!”
Hadrian J Sammut is Head of Advisory Services with the local firm of iMovo Limited. He can be contacted on hadrian.sammut@imovo.com.