Have you noticed your new coworker isn’t human?

Big Data, analytics and automation of work is changing the makeup of the office. More of our decisions are made by non-humans. Less and less of our processes require people. More and more our coworkers aren’t human, either.

That doesn’t mean they’re zombies or aliens, though a few of our office mates seem to be one of the two. As the world digitizes and machines take on more and more roles, the skill sets for carbon life forms in the organization are changing. Average workers become easy to replace (or pay less) in a computerized world, which means average is increasingly a dangerous way to be.

The end of average

Going further, economist Tyler Cowen calls it the end of average. In his book, Average is Over, he explains the idea this way:

The key questions will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you? Worst of all, are you competing against the computer? Are computers helping people in China and India compete against you? If you and your skills are a complement to the computer, your wage and labor market prospects are likely to be cheery. If your skills do not complement the computer, you may want to address that mismatch. Evermore people are starting to fall on one side of the divide or the other. That’s why average is over.

Each and every day there are fewer mindless cubicle dwellers, busy doing “stuff.” Our coworkers that remain are by necessity becoming more collaborative, persuasive, cooperative, motivated and overall, easier to work with. Less manual labor thanks to machines means less employment in brute force or mindless work. More computing means knowledge management isn’t based on what you have in your head.

Looking at the past few years, we can see the evidence clearly. Jobs aren’t coming back and there’s a reason. In Cowen’s view, most of the workers laid off in the recent economic downturn were what he calls “zero marginal product” workers who weren’t producing anything of value. They simply won’t be replaced no matter how much the economy grows.

What about the unskilled?

This is bad news for the unskilled workforce. Andrew Leonard wrote a couple of weeks ago in Salon:

I’ve noted before that the big difference between the current technological revolution and the Industrial Revolution is that the initial technological advances of the 18th century created jobs for unskilled workers, while today’s robot armies are increasingly replacing the jobs of unskilled workers.

So if we agree skills matter does this mean everyone needs to be a coder? Not by any stretch. In fact, coding alone is no guarantee and those jobs routinely seek lower salaries elsewhere in the country or world. The key is to be highly productive by working alongside machines and managing people at the same time — Luddite managers who can’t figure out workplace technology are in grave danger. The new world isn’t man versus machine, it is man and machine.

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Christopher Taylor