Why We Need Human Workers to Make Robots Look Good
Matthew Beane on the countless "little rescues" by humans that make automation pay off, and how robots could be used to really improve workers' lives
In media chatter about robots there's too much speculation, hype and anxiety, and too little actual information about how humans and intelligent machines are getting along. So it's a good idea to keep up with the work of people who are actually finding things out.
One of those scholars is Matthew Beane, an assistant professor in the Technology Management program at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a Digital Fellow at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab. He conducts extensive and painstaking research on the ways people work with real robots in real places. That involves more than getting good answers to one's questions. It's also about figuring out what questions to ask. Common yardsticks — how well robots do the work for which they were engineered, or how (if) they've paid off financially — don't suffice to describe how people reckon with the machines. What Beane calls "the full range of value that we seek from robots" also involves aspects of life that neither investors …