IT Blog

In the future you may be working less for “the man” and more for the machine—machine learning, that is. Automation and AI will replace some jobs outright—threatening up to 25% of U.S. jobs, especially those with simple manual and repetitive tasks—according to a study by the Brookings Institution. But even those of us who don’t lose our jobs to automation may still be under its thumb. In 2040, it may be common for algorithms to supervise our work—sometimes to train our AI replacements, but often to optimize our performance in the corporate machine.

For some workers, that day has already come. The same algorithms that devise your Uber route are directing the drivers themselves, making them more a component of the system than an individual doing a job. Not only directed by algorithms, drivers also feed systems that evaluate their performance, with details such as how smoothly they accelerate and how customers rate the experience. It’s a continuous iterative cycle of…