The algorithm on my team

(Illustration: Ray Oranges) - The automation of work is increasing at a tremendous pace. But how well do technology and humans really work together in a digitised world? Smart robots, self-driving cars, drones and ubiquitous sensors - for some people, these images raise hopes of huge productivity gains and corporate profits, but for others they set alarm bells ringing. In 2013, economist Carl Benedikt Frey and engineer Michael A. Osborne from Oxford University published a study in which they estimated that 47 percent of jobs in the US might soon be lost to automation due to rapid advances in robotics and artificial intelligence. So might the Fourth Industrial Revolution be leading us directly to mass unemployment? Gudela Grote doesn't think so. A Professor of Work and Organisational Psychology at ETH, she notes that Frey und Osborne's findings have been questioned on multiple occasions since they were published. One objection is that the authors did not consider the fact that automation tends to eliminate individual tasks rather than entire jobs. "What's more likely is that people and machines will work together even more closely in the future," says Grote.