WillAI transform HR Into IRA?
There is frenzied and growing speculation on the unimaginable benefits and cataclysmic dangers AI can bring. What can HR do to harness and develop this Promethean power for the benefit of organisations and their people?
"[I]n the future all the important decisions governing the lives of humans will be made by machines or humans whose intelligence is augmented by machines. When? Many think this will take place within their lifetimes."1
A decade has elapsed since James Barrat wrote those chilling words. Since then, Artificial Intelligence has made phenomenal progress and concerns about its calamitous consequences have been getting more dire by the day – their pessimism proportional to the proficiency of the predicting expert. Few (outside the ostrich species) now doubt that the unguarded arrival of superintelligence will be less than catastrophic for the human race " [T]he first superintelligence [to] shape the future of Earth-originating life, could easily have nonanthropomorphic final goals, and would likely have instrumental reasons to pursue open-ended resource acquisition [T]he outcome could
Fortunately, the task of this column is not to imagine post-superintelligence HRM One imagines there will be no such need or, if one arises, pointers will be available from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s grim novel.3 We shall limit our examination to the pre-superintelligence period when floods of AI applications will continue creeping into corporate portals, their ingress unmoderated, bar some perfunctory financial analysis of ROI and the predilections of the business or functional leader whose domain provides the landing ground for the new nostrums. By all accounts, the entry of AI is likely to disrupt the way we do business even more than the previous three industrial revolutions. According to Klaus Schwab: "The first industrial revolution spanned from about 1760 to around 1840 [I]t ushered in mechanical production The second industrial revolution, which started in the late 19th century and into the early 20th century, made mass production possible The third industrial revolution began in the 1960s It is usually called the computer or digital revolution [T]oday we are at the beginning of a fourth industrial revolution It is characterised by a much more ubiquitous and mobile internet, by smaller and more powerful sensors that have become cheaper, and by artificial intelligence and machine learning "4 HR has very good reasons for missing the first and second industrial revolutions: the discipline didn’t exist when they took place. HR missed midwifing the third revolution, not because it was absent from the organisation but because it was not allowed a seat at the table where strategic decisions were being taken. Those days are long past, or so we’d like to believe in HR. Proving it will require us to be obstetricians for the fourth industrial revolution – the one that brings Artificial Intelligence in its wake. That change will be so transformational that we should consider renaming HR itself. If HR is to champion all intelligence adding value to the organisation, it should call itself Intelligent Resource Assets (IRA). The older established siblings would be IRA-N (Natural) while the new AI kid on the block would be called IRA-C (Created) This column will be about IRA-Cs and how they can be integrated safely and productively with IRA-Ns This is not about using AI in HR but how HR (IRA) should manage this new category of productive asset Many of the ideas here may appear outlandish However, even if every one of the suggestions in this column proves to be impractical, its purpose will have been served if it starts a dialogue leading HR to rapidly build its competencies in the choice, introduction and controlled use of AI What would be unacceptable would be for HR to wait for events to happen and be edged out of influencing the most significant transformation business faces. There can be many approaches to managing IRA-Cs. We shall focus here on three aspects that need the most urgent attention from HR:
• Preparing forAI, including selection and onboarding.
• Productivity ofAI and the management of ideas and emotions in its deployment.
• Partnership between people and AI, including the challenges of teaching and supervising these entities. A few readers may object that my descriptors are misleadingly anthropomorphic. I believe my usage is more easily understood by my audience which, when I checked last, was predominantly human
Preparation
Assuming HR (aka IRA) maintains its place at the top table, it must first demonstrate its beneficial presence in the choice of IRA-Cs Readers of this column will be well aware of my distaste for technologies (like automation) or processes (such as contractualisation) which endanger durable employment 5 Hence, it should come as no surprise that the prime choice criterion proposed is for IRA-Cs to be capability and quality extending rather than substituting IRA-Ns (unless it is for distasteful jobs that are impossible to redesign). There will remain a very real possibility that capability extension will be swamped by people substitution over a period of time but that should not prevent HR from putting up a relentless fight against the latter. In any case, the entire problem of technological unemployment will require new economic thinking that will be the subject of a subsequent column. Since sophisticated IRA-Cs will be custom-built (or at least custom-configured) their specifications should be governed and limited by the kind of principles set out by Stuart Russell " … as a guide to AI researchers and developers in thinking about how to create beneficial AI systems "Bostrom provides us with another approach to making IRA-Cs safer He classifies AI into " four types or 'castes' – oracles, genies, sovereigns, and tools An oracle is a question-answering system A genie is a command-executing system A sovereign is a system that has an open-ended mandate to operate in the world in pursuit of broad and possibly very long-range objectives [A tool] simply does what it is programmed to do [With various caveats it appears] the oracle caste is obviously
Read more at : https://www.peoplematters.in/article/technology/will-aitransform-hr-into-ira-38035
