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Technology, augmentation, and predicting the future of work

Published on September 29, 2022   31 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

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0:00
This talk is about the opportunities and implications of the digital transformation that we see all around us. I focus on what is happening in companies. My name is Steven Dhondt. I am a professor at the Belgium Catholic University of Leuven, the KU Leuven. At the same time, I am a researcher at the Dutch Research Institute, TNO, one of the three largest research and technology organisations in Europe. I'm presenting to you from several major research programmes that I have conducted and understanding what impacts technology may have on business and on work.
0:37
In my talk, I shall discuss that there are different perspectives on what this digital transformation means for business and work. The first perspective I shall look at is the idea that new technology is mainly abolishing tasks and workplaces, which is called the substitution perspective. The second perspective is the idea that most digital technologies strengthen the capabilities of workers, which I call the augmentation perspective. Both perspectives contain different predictions of what happens in business and in work. To these perspectives, we want to add the organisational perspective. Our observation is that in understanding what impacts technology may have, we need to determine to what degree workers can control digital technology. The organisational perspective allows us to align with new policy proposals presented by the European Commission called Industry 5.0.
1:30
The starting point of my talk is to explain what we mean by digital transformation. Within our societies, we have been working with computers for nearly 70 years. Computers need to work with structured input in bits and bytes, transformed into computer code. Until very recently, computers could only steer production processes, machines, and persons indirectly. For example, computers could generate orders, but these needed to be fed into machines and given to persons. Over the past decade, we have been able to digitalise technology even further, connect people, processes and organisations, and build decision systems that do not need the help of a human to intervene. As a result, organisations are starting to work in an automatic way.

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Technology, augmentation, and predicting the future of work

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