New vision of the work
We (IT people) are lucky. Why? Because most of us are working on their passion, we have no issue to find a job and if you are reading this article, it’s probably because we are sharing the same target, we’re on a quest of knowledge in a world which is changing every hour, which increase our capacities of acceptation of changes.
This quest of knowledge is a big investment of your time, and if you are investing so much, it’s at the end to reduce your work load: your final target is efficiency. But why efficiency? Efficiency is a new vision of the work. Still in a lot of companies, you are in a best-efforts obligation system, which mean that you need to go to your office from 09:00am to 18:00pm. Fundamentaly, if you don’t do anything during this 9 hours, in a lot of companies especially in the Middle East, nobody cares. You did your 9 hours, خلاص , you did your day. On the other side, you have this result vision, which is just to have some results. If you increase your capabilities and reduce the necessary time to execute a task, you increase the efficiency of your work, so you can keep going on this virtuous way to keep increasing your capabilities. That’s why, as a CTO and a team leader, I never impose working hours to my employees. If you produce better work from home, between 20:00 and 03:00, it’s ok for me, if you deliver what you’ve promised (but if you don’t, we will have a talk). This vision is linked to the fact that jobs are having a greater intellectual value and that you need to reduce the redundant actions, That’s the global automation of the world and not only in IT.
Before, to book a taxi, you had to contact a call center, you had to discuss with a person, which was filling your information, sometimes wrongly, then dispatch it to a taxi driver. This job, even if it’s a hard job, is intellectually equivalent to a toaster. What Uber, Lyft, Careem, etc. are doing around the world is doing some automation of this system. You can now book a taxi with Bots and apps, and soon they will even automate the drivers. Of course you are destroying jobs like this, but are this job valuable if robots are able to do it? When I see French Politicians, trying to keep jobs, instead of increasing the intellectual level of the population, I become crazy. If one day someone can automate my job, I will be happy, because I will be able to learn more, and increase my knowledge in different fields. The last part is the most important: if you pay people to shift from their previous “mechanical Turk” job, to have a job with higher intellectual value, you increase the global level of the society. But this vision is creating a massive economic shift.
Since long time, people have traded their workforce for a place in the society. If you reduce this required workforce, what will you trade? That’s why a lot of debates about the basic income are discussed right now, it’s the creation of a new society paradigm.
How should we manage this new vision of work?
To conclude this small article, I will advice you 1 book, and 1 article:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Spiritual_Machines is a book from Ray Kurzweil, about artificial intelligence and the future course of humanity
- http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460 From Marc Andreessen