The Near Futurist Podcast: Robots & Their Rights
Our UK & Ireland Sales Director, James Ewing recently guested on tech journalist, Guy Clapperton’s podcast, ‘The Near Futurist’, alongside Oleg Rogynskyy, Founder & CEO, People.ai to discuss all things AI and automation. The Near Futurist Podcast takes an in-depth look at the technologies that will benefit businesses in the not-so distant future.
Myth-Busting: “automation will steal human’s jobs”
As with almost all conversations regarding AI and automation the first point for discussion was the notion that automation will replace human’s jobs. This is simply not the case. Businesses will see the biggest benefit when people, AI and robots join forces, enhancing complementary capabilities. Robots and AI work best when doing transactional, data-intense and highly repetitive tasks; allowing people to focus on the more innovative, creative, and strategic tasks.
Keeping up with the times
RPA and AI come under the banner of digital transformation and as companies undergo digital transformation, their approaches to tasks, their processes, their channels to market and their back-end applications can change dramatically. This often means that businesses find themselves needing to re-train employees in order for them to adapt. This may seem like a fairly arduous task but actually it is all part of the necessary change management process that comes with digital transformation, and through implementing automation, processes, tasks and applications can often be far more streamlined, thus increasing businesses’ efficiency in the long run.
Is automation safe?
Another common theme in discussions around AI and automation is safety, with technophobes keen to spread the image of a disaster scenario where robots gain autonomy and take over the world. The reality is that AI is trained by humans and humans didn’t get here by accident. We got here through a series of disaster scenarios meaning we have accounted for each of the possible outcomes of our decisions. Safety-engineering ensures that AI will not go off the rails or make harmful decisions.
You can listen to the full episode here: https://nearfuturist.net/podcast/