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Working-Conditions

It is not bosses but in-demand staff who dictate employment conditions

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Raj Choudhury, an economist from Harvard Business School, is quoted in a Wired article as arguing that the most sought-after job candidates who end up shaping what our jobs look like.

His most recent deduction is that staff now demand much greater flexibility than ever before.

That means employers will need to be open to the options of hybrid working, remote working and variants and will no longer be able to insist on staff being present in the office at all times if they want to retain them.

While working from home became the norm during the Covid pandemic, staff have noticed the benefits and the desire to continue in this way has therefore not gone away.

The article suggests that “established firms will be presented with the decision of whether to hang on to expensive real estate and slow-to-evolve managers, or to just dash to chase the new trend”.

For more on this: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/remote-work-office-labor

AI-Wont-takeover

AI will not take over the world

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AI will not take over the world

In a recent blog we discussed the reliability of AI and automation and the fact that these systems are devised by human beings, highly skilled human beings to be sure, but human beings make mistakes.

Wired has just published two further articles exploring the issue of AI.

In the first it explores whether it is possible to make AI technology completely unbiased and also asks how many businesses benefit as much as they could from AI technology.

It reports that the return on business investment in AI has declined by 27 per cent over the last five years.

The reason, it argues, is that “companies don’t know how to make the most of AI and data analytics, and how they can apply to business problems.”

It also suggests that businesses get things the wrong way wound when considering investing in AI, so that they under-use its potential. It advises that businesses should “start by drawing up a list of business challenges and prioritise them by whether or not they can be addressed by using AI and the expected return on investment”.

The second article, by Joi Ito, director or MIT’s Media Lab, questions the assumption that AI can and will supercede humans in almost every sphere of activity.

Ito calls this assumption singularity in which those people who have succeeded in mastering the power of AI capture all the wealth and power.

This, Ito argues is “reductionist” thinking and only works for a very narrow range of learning and thinking which can lead to over-simplified ways of “fixing” humanity’s problems.

However, Ito says, most of the challenges we face today, such as climate change, poverty, chronic disease or modern terrorism have actually been the result of this reductionist thinking and we need to respect that many human problems are actually much more complex.

Machines, and therefore AI, need to be adaptive and to augment, not replace, humans. “not artificial intelligence but extended intelligence”.