Are you ready to be augmented?

Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby write in the Harvard Business Review,

Suddenly, it seems, people in all walks of life are becoming very concerned about advancing automation.

...Knowledge work—which we’ll define loosely as work that is more mental than manual, involves consequential decision making, and has traditionally required a college education—accounts for a large proportion of jobs in today’s mature economies. It is the high ground to which humanity has retreated as machines have taken over less cognitively challenging work. But in the very foreseeable future, as the Gartner analyst Nigel Rayner says, “many of the things executives do today will be automated.”

What if we were to reframe the situation? What if, rather than asking the traditional question—What tasks currently performed by humans will soon be done more cheaply and rapidly by machines?—we ask a new one: What new feats might people achieve if they had better thinking machines to assist them? Instead of seeing work as a zero-sum game with machines taking an ever greater share, we might see growing possibilities for employment. We could reframe the threat of automation as an opportunity for augmentation.

Read more here.

Artwork: Gordon Bennett, collection of robots, 2006–2012, wood, metal, Bakelite, glass, plastic, rubber, paint; Photography of Alvin, Wilma, and Tenna Robots: Lucas Zarebinski

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit says he is ready to be augmented.