How worried should project managers be about robots taking over their jobs?
Photo by KB35 – Flickr (cc – BY 2.0)
The ’80′s Terminator franchise fed on the fear of a coming robot revolution. And the sense of dread surrounding that hasn’t abated in the years following that blockbuster. Over the past several years, more and more articles have been written about the coming robot domination.
Recently, this topic has resurged and there has been an influx of stories on the Interwebs about the coming robot revolution and the fact that it will forever change the way we work. Kevin Drum has an article in the May/June issue of Mother Jones (and see his follow-ups on the website here and here and here – see what I mean about resurgence?) on this topic and several others have chimed in on the implications (see Matthew Yglasias here in Slate.com).
The thrust of the Mother Jones article was the fact that Moore’s Law (the formula that microprocessing power doubles capacity every 18 months) has proven remarkably resilient. In fact, we may be on the forefront at a quantum jump in that capacity with some of the work that IBM and soon the new Google/NASA alliance are and will be doing respectively in quantum computing. The article rethinks the adage of the rice and chessboard as filling Lake Michigan using the same 18 month cycle. Extrapolating using water for processing power, Kevin Drum postulates that the next 15 years will see us going from just a couple of inches in the lake to it being full.
I think that’s right! Voice recognition and natural language synthesis have gone from laughable to usable in less than 5 years. Large enough data storage capacity in a cheap enough footprint has had a significant impact on knowledge search and retrieval. I believe that there are non-intuitive jobs that are likely going to be impacted fairly rapidly by this trend; pharmacists, truck drivers, delivery people, taxi drivers, garbage men, doctors all come to mind.
I wonder what the overall impact to my chosen profession will be. Certainly, no one wants to be the buggy-whip manufacturer of his generation. And folks rightly or wrongly will always profess that their job or profession “Will Not and Can Not Be The One!!”TM to be impacted by technology. But that can’t be right. We’ve seen IBM’s Deep Blue win Jeopardy against 2 humans. A chess program beat a Grand Master. Google has logged over half-a-million miles and counting semi-autonomously in its’ car. It is coming – it will impact us!
One note on this – I don’t necessarily mean just autonomous, walking-around robots. This may be more about software and automation! But the main point is valid and I think the issues and responses for project managers are these:
- Recognize that technology will dramatically impact our work – The changes brought on by technology will be profound and have an impact. Realizing this can help prepare for these changes. I have found that I don’t mind change but I hate uncertainty. By being open to the coming changes, I can overcome my discomfort with uncertainty. The changes in software tools just over the last five years has been phenomenal. They aren’t slowing down! Changes in input (keyboard to mouse to touch-screen to the coming voice input) methods are going to reduce time and effort. Huge storage and rapid retrieval will allow for greater re-use of project artifacts. Computing speeds combined with these enhancements will move planning and tracking to fully automated functions.
- Get ahead of the curve – Continuing education around the use of technologies and automation systems over the next 5 to 10 years will be crucial. Look for and use better ways to automate your daily work stream. Proficiency is the key here. Automation allows us to move to a 4-hour work-week and to be the lazy, proficient project managers that we should strive for! And that will allow us to -
- Be the one telling the robot what to do rather than being the one being told by the robot – The key to success as automation takes over more and more job functions is to be the driver of the use of technology rather than be driven by it. Learn the automation processes and systems that are moving the industry. Try the new software approaches. Learn to harness the tools available. Continued employment and enjoyment of this profession will require that we are the ones telling the robots what to do!
Filed under: Career, Project Management Tagged: automation, career, lazy project management, motivation, project, project management, Project manager, robots, skill, tips
