Runaway Automation and the IT Organization's Opportunity
I just listened to an IEEE Spectrum podcast titled: The Job Market of 2045 (there is also a transcript here).
Rice University professor Moshe Vardi is quoted as saying: “I do not expect this to happen in the very near future, but I do believe that by 2045, machines will be able to do if not any work that humans can do, then a very significant fraction of the work that humans can do.”
This podcast is worth listening to even if it is only for you to think about the role of IT in this sort of work function shift. Today, many IT organizations are focused on “back office” IT. In this new world, the separation between the back office and customer interface will be much more permeable. When the IT organization is involved in strategic planning, they can take the lessons learned from automation in cloud computing… and push the rest of the organization to embrace the effect to business consistency, quality as well as costs, consumption and the workforce.
The market is “blindly developing the technologies” and IT leadership should have a vision for their organizations on the implications.
