Posted by On the one hand, for the past few weeks there has been no quiet talk that artificial intelligence in the form of ChatGPT (I omit, the fact that it is not artificial intelligence) will replace our jobs in many professions and even its creators are announcing to the world to stop working on it, and on the other hand, after typing the phrase “artificial management” into Google, one article from 1986 by Eliezer Geisler appears, defining the terms artificial manager and artificial management. Just one scientific text on the first page of Google!
Here is that article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0007681386900182
Of course, there are more articles on artificial management in scientific databases, such as Web of Science or Scopus, but you can still count them on the fingers of both hands in a year. It is really inconceivable to me that in such a great cloud of fear of artificial intelligence almost no one is talking about the fact that after all, there is a human manager standing in line to be replaced by artificial intelligence, and not far away at all.
When I started working on this topic in 2008, gradually designing an organizational size system, which is the methodological basis for studying organizational reality in order to replace the manager with a robot, my presentations at scientific conferences were met with laughter, disbelief and doubt. So the work went slowly for me, but I was not discouraged, and after many hundreds of hours of studying philosophy, methodology, information theory, etc., I published a theoretical prototype of an organizational size system.
See the fundamental assumptions involved in studying organizational reality to build a robotic manager capable of imitating a human manager:
Theoretical foundation for managers behavior analysis by graph-based pattern matching
A few years passed, texts appeared on the Internet describing the first attempts to replace people in managerial positions with automatons (not very intelligent, but always). See such articles from that period, when the robot manager was already emerging on the horizon:
D. Fidler: Here’s How Managers Can Be Replaced by Software. Harvard Business Review 2015, April,
https://hbr.org/2015/04/heres-how-managers-can-be-replaced-by-software#
T.H. Davenport, J. Kirby: Beyond Automation. Harvard Business Review 2015, June, https://hbr.org/2015/06/beyond-automation
M. Chui, J. Manyika, M. Miremadi: How Many of Your Daily Tasks Could Be Automated? Harvard Business Review 2015, December
https://hbr.org/2015/12/how-many-of-your-daily-tasks-could-be-automated
M. Chui, J. Manyika, M. Miremadi: Four Fundamentals of Workplace Automation. McKinsey Quarterly 2015, November
And all of a sudden, after 2021, we have again a denial of the idea of replacing the human manager with an artificial manager:
F. Martela, J. Luoma: Why AI Will Never Replace Managers. Harvard Business Review 2021, September
https://hbr.org/2021/09/why-ai-will-never-replace-managers
Y. Atsmon: Artificial intelligence in strategy. McKinsey Quarterly 2023, Janury
However, it is still a topic that only a few people deal with, seeing only certain slices of a manager’s work, and most often focusing on a specific activity: decision-making….
The manager of the future is a robot. Why is almost no one writing or talking about it?…