Homo Augmentus — Super-Humans & Robot Colleagues
Homo Augmentus is a term that Nokia Bell Lab coined to describe the way AI and robotics are replicating, enhancing and augmenting human capabilities, enabling Homo Sapiens to overcome their physical and mental limitations.
The combination of human and machine is rapidly evolving, AI technology is dropping in cost and there are huge advantages available to companies that move fast to maximise the benefits of having Super-Humans on the team. Which of the following are already on your HR Radar?
a. How could you use Super-humans? It is now possible to augment the capacity of the people in your teams. This can have huge strategic impact because location, ability, working hours and other limitations can be overcome or at least mitigated.
Which roles / people in your organisation would you like to supercharge or duplicate? What is it that they do that could be super-charged, replicated or supported with AI or automation? Can you get rid of bottle-necks in your processes that are caused by human limitations?
b. Diverse Talent Pools: For many roles technology could make the employee’s location, disabilities, physical strength, ability to crunch data and/or the languages they speak irrelevant.
In fact organisations are increasingly recognising distinct advantages from physical and neuro-diversity, like the UK’s GCHQ who actively source people with dyslexia for certain “Mission Critical” roles.
Technology can enhance and support neuro-diverse and differently abled individuals in unprecedented ways. For instance, Natural Language Processing can transcribe and act on spoken instructions much faster than typed instructions, which means blindness, apraxia and dyslexia are no limitations in that regard.
That being so, which new geographies, socio-demographic groups and diverse resource pools should you explore for talent?
Could specialist agencies help you tap into new talent pools (e.g. Autistic talent from ASPIeRATIONS or Neurodiverse employees from Exceptional Individuals ) to address growing skills shortages?
c. Make the most of your experts’ time: Continuous Active Learning (CAL) enables AI to streamline the triage of massive data sets, helping prioritise cases that need expert human assessment and automating the processing of simpler cases. This is already being used to great effect, focusing experts’ time where it adds most value and producing results faster in medical, pharmaceutical, forensic, customer services and legal environments (e.g. Conduent case study: Streamlining legal experts’ document reviews on a global scale).
By restructuring your experts’ workflow, you can multiply their productivity and take away the parts of the role that are less interesting — enhancing retention, engagement, satisfaction and output of skilled people that differentiate your company.
Who could this apply to in your organisation? Do you have limited expert resources that could be enhanced by automations with CAL?
d. Improve Wellbeing with Automated Support. How will your company health and wellbeing processes change when employees start to notify you that their body monitors have detected high stress levels and/or pre-symptom signs of emerging disease (e.g Novel optical sensors that detect disease before symptoms are visible)? This is going to raise questions and risks and HR will be in the centre of debates like the following:
i. Is monitoring for stress an ethical necessity or an intrusion? Will either of those result in a legal risk, and if so, what are you going to do to mitigate that?
ii. Will you actively invest in monitors to maximise employee health, lower medical costs and reduce downtime?
iii. Will you need a different policy in different locations? For instance, in the US the insurance company might offer lower premiums if you monitor exercise regimes versus France, where the government are more likely to insist on anonymity and/or proof that no excessive hours or pressure are forced on employees.
e. Expertise replication: If unlimited expertise can be deployed anywhere, how will it change your organisation design and cost base, your knowledge transfer and training processes, and your workforce profile?
As well as cognitive replications (robot decision-making), machines can replicate the exact movements of a skilled artisan, anywhere in the world, multiple times. 3D-printing can produce items that are very difficult to create in any other way, without import taxes. Augment those physical actions with an understanding of complex decision-making, and expertise can be replicated by machine.
There will be innovations combining human expertise and automation in almost in every sector: Surgeons teaching or operating remotely with robot support are already more effective; all the bolts on your oil platform or wind turbine could be expertly tensioned whilst halving the berths or high seas access requirements; restaurants no longer “need” chefs.
Conclusion
The limits to replication of expertise are your corporate imagination, the skills to implement and maintain the solutions and the organisation design that ensures you have the right skills in place — so what is your future OD plan, given the super-human workforce profile that will be needed to compete?
(This is part of a 10-part series looking at imminent HR disruptions; for the full article click here)
