Most of the thinking – the little that’s done – around the affect of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics replacing jobs, is somewhat negative, so it was almost a relief to read John Hagel’s perspective that we could use this transition as an opportunity to rethink the nature of work.
After considering the nature of work now, he explores a very positive concept of rethinking work as:
What if we focused on creating work that focused on systematically tapping into our creativity, imagination, and emotional and social intelligence?
He then goes on to expand on the very real challenges of making the sort of changes that he identifies:
-  It certainly won’t be the threat of job elimination on its own.
- There are two forces that will ultimately catalyze and drive this shift.
- First, large existing institutions will experience such mounting performance pressure that cost cutting alone will not be sufficient.
- Second, we as individuals are all experiencing mounting performance pressure and finding that our existing institutions are constraining our ability to develop faster, so we’ll be motivated to jump ship so that we can develop more rapidly on our own.
I wish I shared his optimistic outlook. As well as the article John Hagel wants to go deeper into the topic at a SXSW panel and needs us to vote it up so it gets picked as a topic.