The play that gave the world the word "robot" is about work. Karel Čapek's R.U.R. imagines artificial workers manufactured because they are cheaper than people, a world economy that comes to depend on them, and a human race that loses first its purpose and then its existence (35, Čapek, 1920). A century later the fear has two forms. The first is obsolescence: machines that write, analyse and decide will leave large numbers of people with no work. The second is quieter and closer to E. M. Forster's story of the machine that stopped (33, Forster, 1909): the work remains, but the people who remain become supervisors of systems they no longer understand, and lose the skills they would need on the day the system fails.
This chapter tests T8 The machine that stops, and the humans who forgot at the scale of work. Chapter 6 examined the trope in the individual mind and Chapter 7 in education; this chapter takes the organisational view, from exposure and productivity to the ironies of automation, rubber-stamping and the redesign of work. Every governance arrangement in the series rests on human judgement, so if that judgement erodes, oversight becomes a formality.
Table 14.1: Ways to break the spiral.
Primary topics explored
- Exposure is not replacement
- The productivity evidence
- The ironies of automation
- Deskilling and rubber-stamping
- Redesigning work
- The debate
About AI Threat
AI Threat is Book 5 of The Transformed Architecture. It investigates whether the dystopias of science fiction, with AI as the threat, are coming true. It covers every scale of the threat, from the human mind and society to misuse, machines beyond control and the end of the world, stages every debate constructively, and turns the verdict into what individuals, European enterprises and public authorities can do.
It builds on the conclusions of Architecture as Code, AI Governance, AI Platform and Security and AI Red Team.
Boards, chief risk officers, CISOs, AI governance leads, architects and public-sector leaders.
Gunnar Nordqvist
Conceived, directed and published the books of The Transformed Architecture.
Continue with the full chapter
Chapter 14: Work, Skills and the Ironies of Automation in AI Threat gives the detailed explanations, practical examples and implementation patterns behind this summary.
This whitepaper belongs to “Society and Truth” and is one of 39 drawn from the manuscript.