What do you think about technology replacing humans?

Chuck,

Organizations, businesses, and society are driven by a desire for better, faster, easier. Where a process can be identified, process improvement is applied. This has led to robotic factories with no humans - such as army radio sets.

Humans do some things well, other things, not so well. We are not as good as machines when it comes to consistency and speed, the essence of low-cost high-quality. 

I believe this progression to more automation with fewer humans will continue unabated until automation is not better than a human - if endpoints exist where that is the case. 

Given this site, here is a management consulting example. A critical weakness in the profession is that three consultants will draw three different sets of conclusions and propose three different sets of actions when asked to analyze the same set of client data.

They each start in different places, then travel the data down different paths, different things in the data catch their attention, one will analyze for 30 minutes and feel they have the answer, while another will spend five hours and still think there is more to learn. 

So which one of the three proposals to the client is right?

Can you imagine how customers react when you explain this reality of their supplier? One set of analytics, three consultants, three different business outcomes. Hence, they ask for the A-Team, but no consulting firm is all A-Teams and the same dynamic applies with three A-Team members.

That caused my organization to create JOE. JOE is AI - Augmented Intelligence. Not artificial, not trying to replace the mgmt consultant, but augmenting. Jarvis to IronMan.

A consultant using JOE clicks a button and JOE analyzes the client data. JOE follows sound critical thinking paths and appropriate subject frames to arrive at a complete and accurate set of observations, in seconds.

Three different consultants can trigger JOE, but JOE will give them each the same analysis. Not only does this save hours of conventional analysis work by the consultant, but the client can have valid confidence in what they are being told.

My clients - consulting firms - like JOE. They are very happy to replace hours of analysis work with the click of a button. They use JOE as a competitive weapon against firms selling conventional consulting. JOE isn't an existential threat - there are still plenty of places in the consulting process where their human capabilities are a long way from being automated.

I hope this provides one answer to your question. 

BTW Have you read Homo Deus by Noah Harari? If not, he has many responses to your question.

Best

Michael