In any discussion on augmenting human capabilities, the user interface is critical. Programs, websites, and apps are essentially user interfaces and thus augment and empower while structuring human capabilities and activities. Standard office applications (such as Word and Excel) designed and built for personal computers, contributed to the diminishing demand for secretaries and concurrent increase in staff assistants and computer specialists. The user interface profoundly influences who can use and deploy computing power.

Whether and how computer systems augmenting workers’ skills and knowledge will be developed and deployed remains an open question, to be discovered sector by sector, production phase by production phase. Indeed, the required mix of skills will depend on how ICT tools are deployed and on the user interfaces that are developed.

In the choices businesses must make about the design, development, and deployment of the tools they use for automation, one question is crucial: Are workers an asset to be promoted and developed, partners in competition with other firms? If workers are strategic, then a primary challenge is imagining and investing in tools, including user interfaces, that make all workers more productive, effectively a strategy for augmenting intelligence. To illustrate, Ton25 showed that even in the commodity retail business, a profitable strategy can be a good-jobs strategy involving investment in workers and organizational strategies to help those workers develop their capabilities and achieve their potential.

The implication is that if society
invests in technologies, business mod-
els, and companies subscribing to the
belief that intelligent tools will inevi-
tably displace work, with investment
after investment made to find ways
to substitute capital for labor, then a
dystopian outcome is inevitable and
with it a road toward digital displace-
ment on a mass scale. The prophecy of
ICT displacing human beings will thus
be self-fulfilling. In contrast, if a con-
certed effort is made to discover how
to use ICT to augment intelligence,
upgrading jobs throughout the work
spectrum, then perhaps these digital
resources can be harnessed to build a
video creators on YouTube, new work,
tasks, and sources of income are being
created. Moreover, the innovation dy-
namic can never be totally “automat-
ed,” remaining for the foreseeable fu-
ture a domain of human inventiveness
and initiative. This is particularly true
given that digital resources (such as
open source software and cloud com-
puting resources and capital for in-
novative activities) are more available
than ever before.

A crucial question for society, however, is whether this new world will include only employment and reward for the highly trained top 10% of society, those lucky enough to be anointed YouTube “stars,” have their app go viral, start a new firm later acquired by an existing firm, or be employed in a core firm. Where income will come from for those with more modest training and education not blessed with inherited status, born with innate and recognized intelligence, or just not lucky? Some, including Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne22 have argued that broad swaths of work—standard routine tasks, arguably the bulk of work today—are directly vulnerable to displacement by intelligent tools. 9 However, such displacement is not, in fact, evident. Other research suggests that even routine manufacturing tasks, seemingly most vulnerable to automation, are less routine than they might appear at first glance. Moreover, the automation itself opens new shop-floor-level domains requiring judgment and augmented human capabilities.

An alternate view maintains that computation can augment human intelligence and capabilities. There is already evidence that even routine work can be augmented. Often, however, such augmentation involves contradictory elements. For example, in Japan, where there are shortages today of skilled operators of heavy equipment, equipment manufacturer Komatsu introduced an excavator that uses computation to calculate the correct angle of the digging blade so it does not dig too far. This control enables even relatively inexperienced operators with lower skill levels to work effectively in situations where previously only highly experienced operators could be used. 3

The jobs question
is as difficult
to sort through
as the productivity
question, because
it is impossible
to predict
what new work
will arise as
the economy
changes.