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90 BCBusiness october 2016 of self-driving attackers? Are we facing a jobless robot future? A World Economic Forum report entitled The Future of Jobs suggests that more automation won't be so much about replacing workers as changing the nature of their jobs. Workers will need new skills. "Even those jobs that are less directly a"ected by technological change and have a largely stable employ- ment outlook—say, marketing or supply chain professionals targeting a new demographic in an emerging market— may require very di"erent skill sets just a few years from now as the ecosystems within which they operate change." We've survived mechanical work- place intruders before. Refrigerators, for example, were giant metal job- killers, wiping out the entire ice industry. And there still exists in India a widely used domestic laundry sector. Historically, technological progress has been absorbed by modern economies as the workforce moves into new indus- tries. We bene•t from greater e„ciency, and the streets do not •ll with idle ice men and Pony Express riders. Fear seems to outpace excitement when people consider the prospect of increasing automation. But arguments about job loss tend to •ip around. Some decry the plight of the expendable worker, victim of a soulless techno- future driven by big business mechani- zation. Yet in the next breath they might well point out that climate change will require a wholesale industrial shift away from fossil fuels. This shift will of course entail job losses. But it's the price of progress, and, the argument goes, new eneršy technologies will bring new jobs. Maybe some of those will involve robots. As we know from Terminator II, some- times the robots are the good guys. There are limits to automation, surely. The fuzzy edges of judgment, that je ne sais quoi human touch that, Blade Runner notwithstanding, cannot be replicated. The remarkable facility of the human brain de•es true simulation. But where are the boundaries beyond which only humans can advance? Perhaps not where we blithely assume. Robots could one day be corporate lead- ers. Writing in Fast Company, futurist Liz Alexander points out that the image of the masterful CEO whose guidance is indispensable may be no more than executive suite hubris. In the areas of strategic planning, hiring and pro- moting pro•tability, more advanced automated systems could someday replace highly paid meat bags. In the same way that indexed funds often outperform managed variety, CEOs often claim to be masters of generating pro•t, yet studies show that as a group they tend to turn in results that are no better than random. Robots can hire without prejudice, a task repeated stud- ies have shown is di„cult for humans to pull o". And people tend to rely too much on their own past experience when predicting the future—automated systems could soon prove more capable of predicting future trends. Robot mastery—it may not require a hostile takeover. Perhaps just a share- holders' vote. "While one ideation session is certainly not a panacea for the host of solutions that are needed, a few key concepts emerged." (Forbes, May 26, 2016) the word ideation was conceived in 1829 when philosopher James Mill declared in Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, "as we say sensation, we might say also, ideation; it would be a very useful word." It's been useful in medicine to describe the capacity for forming ideas but not necessarily acting upon them, e.g., "suicidal ideation"(Merriam-Webster); in business, according to Investopedia, ideation involves every process used to take an idea from its moment of conception to its real-world application. idea•tion JARGON WATCH [from ideare: form an idea]

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