Richard Susskind’s new book How to Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed suggests three ways AI might change the workplace–and which one to worry about. He distinguishes three concepts:
- Automation (task substitution) is about finding a way to be more efficient about doing what we are doing now.
- Innovation means delivering the outcomes clients want, using techniques or technology that support radically new underlying processes.
- Elimination means not just solving a problem but eliminating it.
Many analysts see automation as the biggest AI threat to jobs. Innovation and elimination may be bigger dangers. Susskind makes a convincing case — to me, at any rate — that using AI to implement different approaches to conflict resolution or prevention of legal problems could reduce or replace litigation as we know it.