Could your boss be a robot?

Posted by

Have you ever wondered what your job would be like if your boss was a robot? If you are the boss – how much would your day change if you could buy a robot manager? And finally – if you set up two identical companies, selling the same products, which one would be more efficient and achieve better results – the first, managed by a human, or the second, whose boss would be a robot?

I asked myself these questions as early as 15 years ago, when my engineering imagination and experience with managerial techniques hinted at the inevitable – the automation of the manager’s work. In those years it was not at all obvious. You Tube had only just become the property of Google, smartphones were associated exclusively with Apple, and Google Maps often led the way to the middle of a lake rather than to the center of a chosen city.

The scientists and managers with whom I had lengthy conversations at the time about replacing the human manager with a robotic manager were not keen on the idea. Some scoffed at the idea of Artificial Management (I myself called it Team Management Automation – why? I’ll explain it in future posts) giving the argument that, after all, management is very “human” and you can’t replace emotions with an algorithm. Others were knocking themselves on the forehead, perhaps a little for fear of losing their occupation.

I, however, was sure it would happen someday. Although we still can’t buy ourselves a Steve Jobs, almost everyone already realizes that replacing humans with Artificial Intelligence in most professions and areas of life is just a matter of time.

During these dozen years, I have laid the theoretical groundwork for building a robotic manager, the first measurement tools and performed many experiments in this field. In the following posts, I will show the most interesting parts of this path and their use in research on replacing the human manager with a robot manager.