White-collar Jobs Set To Disappear
The Age
Tuesday November 17, 1998
OFFICE workers of the near future will be playing a game of musical chairs for their jobs, repeatedly losing out as artificial intelligence slashes traditional white collar roles, an expert has warned.
Belgian neurosurgeon and software interface designer, Professor Patrick Georges, said in Melbourne last week that offices will be very lonely places in the future for the few white collar workers left.
Just as increased mechanisation and automated heavy machinery has cut blue collar jobs, information agents, or software robots, will see many paper shufflers seeking opportunities elsewhere.
Georges is positive about the coming age of job losses. He says it will cure society of the "malediction" of work, allowing us more time to do the things we really want.
"Artificial intelligence will replace people - sales automation, decision automation, auto-piloting. Within 10 years you will see an office with only one to two people and all computer and software will run business. It will improve the productivity of white collar (workers)," Georges said.
"Our problem is to improve productivity, to increase the wealth. To distribute the wealth it is politics, and ethics. You could pay people the fixed salary for two hours of work. This is politics.
"We are ergonomists. So what we try to do is improve productivity and safety at work. This is because 15 per cent of managers die early because of stress-related diseases.
"Increasing productivity is the trend of history."
Georges is founder and director of NET Research, a company that directs future trends in human-machine interaction. He was in Melbourne to attend last week's SAP business forum and user group meeting, Sapphire 98.
The technology behind his Management Cockpit for SAP's enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, R/3, was bought by the Germans to augment the product line. It has been installed around the world - in Japan, the US and Europe. Based on military information systems, like those found in battleships and defence installations, the "civilian war room" allows business decision makers to more easily gauge key enterprise indicators in real time.
Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto California has a mobile Cockpit they can drive between locations to co-ordinate management efforts across the globe.
In the process of developing the system, Prof. Georges constructed 500 rules of organisational intelligence. For instance, "you are 12 per cent more intelligent if you read a report on an uncluttered white desk", he says, than if you read the same report surrounded by memo flotsam.
But companies like Microsoft and Apple still have a lot to learn about user interfaces.
"You could learn a lot from brain sciences on how to present information."
MOST Windows systems hide information from the user, reducing their ability to integrate ideas and make sense of the world. To be effective, all relevant information must be available within the immediate field of view.
And, although the human brain is speed-limited at about 800 words a minute, most multimedia information systems deliver the equivalent of about 4000 words a minute, adding to the oft-touted information overload syndrome.
The cockpit is also seen as a way to improve corporate memory and respond to issues through pre-determined action plans and performance targets. The ERP system remembers what decisions were taken in response to threats, and can issue managers with information and the results of the actions. It will ask if you want to follow that course again, or choose a different solution.
Georges says the future of artificial intelligence lies not in monstrous central computing systems, but in distributed networks of dumb computers and sensors, each contributing their small bits of data.
``The brain is working like this - neurons are very dumb. There's no intelligence. There's a lot of delegation to lots of the human brain."
``It's more natural intelligence that will recreate natural behaviour."
© 1998 The Age
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