The features of an automation solution we can legitimately endorse — Automated decision systems can have a significant impact on our lives. They can determine loan approvals, hiring decisions, or even court sentences. More importantly, these automation solutions can affect our autonomy, that is, our capacity to make authentic and self-governing decisions. …

Games as generators of meaning — Even if the idea is debatable, a world without work seems inevitable in the long term. At least some part of the population will go through permanent unemployment. Such a change could disrupt millions of lives, as paid work is a high source of psychological safety and contentment for people. …

Abacus, Google Maps, and cyborgs — When it comes to technological change, there’s no shortage of pessimistic thinkers. One of their recurring themes sounds fairly familiar: are new technologies making us dumber? Like many assumed ideas, it’s more complicated than that. While discharging us from key cognitive tasks, most automation solutions are also expanding our cognitive…

Design and creativity at the heart of future industrial jobs — You might have all received a gift once in your life. The purpose of gifts is to make you feel uniquely valued. They get their emotional power from being tailored to your personal preferences and experiences. Today I got to wonder: when factories will be fully automated, who will be…

Labor-first entrepreneurship and cooperatives — This week, I read an interesting fact from a not very well-known country. I learned that the Finish government invests a heavy part of its budget in human resources. It provides its citizens with long-lasting education and financially supports its researchers. It also enables unemployed and entrepreneurs to venture into…

Automation systems vs human expertise — It’s a well-known problem for aircraft pilots: when the weather is foggy or cloudy, landing is hard. Automated landing systems emerged to help them operate planes in low visibility conditions. Yet, despite proven records, aircraft pilots are rarely turning on autoland to make for a perfect landing. They feel they…

The way to ethical automation — Throughout the ages, automation has focused primarily on reducing costs and increasing productivity. From Jacquard mechanical looms to ATMs and industrial robots, automation innovators sought to leverage the business opportunities brought by technology improvements. Until now, those automation tools have contributed to the social and economic prosperity of western countries…

The promise of automating automation — As only 13% of companies can scale their RPA use cases, enterprise automation today faces many hurdles. So what if you could automate the discovery of automation opportunities? This is the promise of hyperautomation. By analyzing and mining business processes, these technologies can detect easily automatable tasks and generate AI-based…

The different tools that are going to save you tremendous time — It’s a fact easy to miss, but automation has already spread everywhere in the corporate world. Less visible than robots, software that handle time-intensive business processes are becoming commonplace in the workplace. These tools provide you with great opportunities to delegate tedious office tasks and focus on higher-value actions.