Who's afraid of robots?

How technological advancement is revolutionizing the economy, labor relations and the role of leaders around the world

In England, a robot chef capable of over 2,000 recipes is about to be launched. In Amazon’s US stocks, robots separate orders, which explains the speed of delivery – in more than 5,000 US cities, it is possible to receive products on the same day of purchase. In California, tests of short-distance deliveries are also made by robots. Soon autonomous cars are expected to be circulating in the streets. What will happen to cooks, storerooms, motoboys and many other professionals so indispensable in the past and present?

When we talk about the future of work, we tend to be afraid. Fear that machines will replace us. And indeed, they are already replacing – and will continue to replace – various professions. But this is one side of the story. The other is that they will also make it possible to augment and create new functions previously unimaginable. That’s what I talked about during my talk on the first INNITI Day.

In England, for example, there was a drastic decline in jobs in different sectors between 1992 and 2014: reductions of 82% in the footwear industry and 79% in textiles, 52% in secretarial jobs and 50% in the agricultural sector. On the other hand, during the same period, there was a 909% increase in the number of nurses, 365% in consultants and business analysts and 156% in actors, producers and presenters. In all, 6 million jobs were created, even with the adoption of the technology.

Future Work

In the last few years, we’ve seen some new professions born: social media managers, app developers, youtubers, big data analysts, and Uber drivers – none of them existed ten years ago. And many more are yet to come: curiosity tutors (we have more time to learn, but often we don’t know what to choose because there is so much information available), digital detox specialists (who don’t we need?), Death managers (we are building up a huge virtual heritage), composers of experiences (Airbnb already offers this
service) and personal health coaches (how to manage our health information and make preventive medicine decisions?).

It is not only the professions themselves that are changing, but also the work regimes. According to a study by Lawrence Katz, professor of economics at Harvard University, and Alan Krueger, professor of economics at Princeton University, one-third of the US population does freelance work, and 94 percent of jobs increase between 2005 and 2005. 2015 came from informal work. Here in Brazil, informal work is viewed with negative eyes, but the most developed economy in the
world treats you as positive. I believe we need to reframe this concept.

The role of leaders

The fact that change is happening fast leads us to ask: Where are the great leaders of our time? My answer is that they are at Amazon (Jeff Bezos), Apple (Tim Cook), Google (Larry Page), Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg), and Microsoft (Bill Gates) – companies where we put a lot of resources like time is money. They are the people who are transforming the world and, not coincidentally, they are the founders or CEOs of the five largest companies in market value in the world.

But how to define leadership? According to John Kotter, professor emeritus of Harvard and expert in the subject,
Leading is not planning and budgeting – it is managing. To lead is to define the direction. Both are
important and some leaders have to do both, but he makes the differences clear: setting direction requires aligning people with a cause, motivating them, and inspiring them.

What is the highest level a leader can reach? For Jim Collins, who has studied nearly 1,500 companies to understand what separated the good from the good, it is the top level of a total of five – the leader who, at the same time, has the determination to do what he needs and a humility far above average. He found that it was precisely the presence of this kind of leader that differentiated the performance and durability of these companies because, unlike most leaders, “level 5” makes
successors better than themselves.

These leaders are able to train people who excel because they have what psychologist Daniel Goleman has defined as the pillars of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-management skills, emotional control, empathy, and social skills.

Goleman went on to look at how this intelligence applied to work, and realized that leaders with high levels of emotional intelligence typically deliver 50 percent better results than leaders who lack well-developed emotional intelligence.

Returning then to our fear of machines, I ask: Will robots really be able to do everything? In my view, certainly not. Some activities are completely human. I don’t see a machine being curious and testing the frontiers of knowledge as astrophysicist Neil does
deGrasse Tyson, for example. Likewise, I can’t imagine them replacing humorists. Have you ever asked Siri to tell a joke? It’s terrible! Likewise, I don’t see robots acting in the field of imagination and art. Pablo Picasso said: “Computers are useless, they only give the answers.”

What, then, is the role of leadership in this new context? It is to ask questions, since machines only
have the answers.