Posted by It’s already September and it’s time to end the summer video review on artificial intelligence. I think I will still return to this idea, because the number of interesting materials on YT seems to grow exponentially as a function of time, and I myself can’t even quite keep up with watching all the interesting interviews or studies. That’s why we’ll take a break for a while and I’ll tell you further about my research I’m doing on replacing a human robot with an artificial manager.
In 2019, I was at an international conference in San Francisco called the Future of Information and Communication Conference 2019, and I was able to talk to many researchers there who are involved in information technology and process automation. This was more than 4 years ago, which is in the era before GPT Chat! However, after all, pattern recognition and machine learning methods were not created in the winter of 2023, but had been in development for two decades.
That’s why I published an article as part of this conference, which comprehensively presented the principles that need to be met for a machine to be a manager. Technical progress is so fast that today I can already imagine what this machine could look like – for example, my boss could be a lovely Ameca. See my last post:
Whatever the robot manager looks like, he must have a real impact on me as an employee. So what conditions must be met for Ameca to actually be the manager of my team?
First, there must be predictability in the behavior of people working together, in this case the robot manager and the participants in the organization, for example, members of his team. There is a very simple solution to this – not only do we need to know what the manager is doing (the most important question!), but also what his co-workers are doing so that the artificial manager can understand their actions, or more precisely, predict what they can do. A technical question arises here: how to record the behavior of team members? The answer here is TransistorsHead.com’s online managerial tools, which you can read about in my other posts.
Secondly, there must be the ability of the artificial manager to exert real influence on the organization’s participants and vice versa. I think this is where there is a bit of a gap in thinking about the robot as a being that functions in a human environment. It is one thing for a robot to look nice, speak correctly and pretend to understand everything. On the other hand, for that robot to be able to get you to do something as part of a team, to influence you in your work, just like your boss today, is another. This is an extremely important issue that I’ve already touched on in the blog – how an artificial manager should build his authority.
Third, there must be a common basis for transferring knowledge about organizational reality between the artificial manager and organizational participants (not just the language used for communication). In other words, there must be some kind of knowledge management system that gathers knowledge about what the human manager and his team members are doing so that the artificial manager can learn.
In my next post, I will describe further findings from a paper published at the Future of Information and Communication Conference 2019, but you can check it out now: