Gina Dokko is a University of California Davis, career scholar who chaired a panel titled "Robots And Algorithms And AI, Oh My!" at a recent meeting of the Academy of Management. The panel involved three more scholars, a business school dean, a writer on work and technology, and a job market analytics CEO. Their charge was to look beyond the short-term advice commonly available, and to ask a series of deeper questions: “What do these technologies mean for careers? What does a good career look like now? How can people starting their careers prepare for a lifetime of work? How do people in the middle of their careers proceed along career paths that are shifting or buckling?” Here’s what Dokko told me, and how it can be helpful to you.
Two sides to each issue. Dokko’s first takeaway is that there are two sides to every issue on the table. One side is concerned with short-term improvements for people and organizations, the other side is concerned with what the issue means long-term. Writer Julia Kirby talked about a journalist who uses artificial intelligence (AI) to search and sort out what’s interesting to him, and help him see where he can add value in his writing. Harvard Business School professor Ethan Bernstein described how advanced performance tracking software can raise the stature of employees previously receiving little supervisor or peer-group support. Both these examples point to positive ways in which technology can help advance your career. In contrast, though, there are a wider questions like, “What’s to be done if ‘grunt’ jobs are automated and places to gain early career experience are eliminated?” or more broadly, “What if new technology breaks one or more steps on an established career ladder?” Most situations are nuanced, and it’s important to realize that as you face them.
Threats and opportunities across careers. Melissa Mazmanian, technology scholar from UC Irvine, raised a question about differences between a first job decision and a mid-career job change. One is largely uninformed, the other comes with the value of half a lifetime’s experience. However, the accumulation of that experience can run parallel to a progressive disconnection from rapidly changing technology. Careers in marketing and accounting, for example, look very different now after changes brought about over the past 20 years. You need to watch out for the changes affecting you, as well as for potentially unhelpful assumptions people make when they think about technological progress. Matthew Bidwell of the University of Pennsylvania spoke about office workers, and how they had survived previous waves of technological change – like bulk photocopying, typing pools, centralized computing and dial-up email and web connections – that have come and gone. You can do better by adapting to change rather than resisting it.
Replacement of “thinking work.” Dokko said it can be argued that previous waves of change were automating administrative work, but that technology now appears to be crossing a new threshold – replacing thinking work! Thinking is necessary to drive a car or a truck, but manufacturers are introducing new models with built-in robots that drive better. Meanwhile, there are 3.5 million truckers in the US, most of them supporting middle-class homes. Where will they go? For your career, you can ask what future AI advances will make you more vulnerable? Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, recent winner of the prestigious Turing Award, suggested in 2016 that “People should stop training radiologists now.” In his view it was completely obvious that in five years time AI would be able to do their work better. Again, though, there is a case for trying to adapt to the changes underway. Perhaps there are subtleties to a radiologist’s job Hinton doesn’t understand? More broadly, perhaps you can challenge the underlying assumptions cataloged in books like Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction, where those so-called weapons are the algorithms that increasingly regulate your life?
A new role for educators. Raj Echambadi, Dean of Northeastern University Business School, spoke persuasively about the idea of a 60-year curriculum, a kind of permanent companion as you travel the course of your career. This would involve “hybrid” curricula for future students, providing new literacies for new skill sets. One tantalizing possibility is that such a curriculum might call for what many senior managers are already seeing – a need for more “soft skills” in social and people-centered thinking. This sentiment was echoed by Matt Sigelman, CEO of Burning Glass Technologies, reflecting on trends he saw in new job postings. The “hard” skills are in many cases being automated, so that your ability to manage and inspire people, or effectively contribute to project teams, becomes more critical. In her teaching on the UC Davis M.S. program in Business Analytics, Dokko insists what’s important is not so much what’s in any “big data,” but what surrounds that data.
A challenge for society This appears as the biggest issue of all. Dokko reflects, how well did society cope when transitioning from an agricultural system to a factory system, and in turn away from the factory toward a service economy? How well did society’s institutions help people deal with the loss of major sources of local employment - such as automobile factories, coal mines, shipbuilding sites, and more? Have nations learned anything from history, and if so is there any prospect of applying that learning today? There is a strong correlation between what looks like society’s failure to help people transition to new work, and the global rise of nationalism. What do scholars who study these things, including business school scholars, have to say about this correlation? At least the mix of scholars and other experts on Dokko’s panel went some way toward addressing this question, and for that they are to be congratulated.
The above paragraphs distill several important issues in the way “robots and algorithms and AI” are likely to interact with your career. A final question is what can you do about these issues? It would be unwise to wait until the challenges listed above get resolved. It would also be unwise to wait for scholars to agree on fresh solutions. Keep in mind that your own career represents a unique trajectory through time and social space to which nobody else can fully relate. Ask how are the new technologies affecting you, and what opportunities do they present in both the short and long term? If society is to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past you don’t want to be part of the problem, you do want to be part of the solution.
