How AI will indulge bosses’ most toxic instincts

The race to adopt Al is so fast-paced and the FOMO so all-consuming that companies, in their obsession with hitting the metrics, are forgetting about subtle things such as creativity.

- By Adrian Wooldridge

THE most important question that companies face in deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not technological but organizational: Should they use AI to increase the power of high-up managers or liberate frontline workers? I suspect that the bulk of them will give the wrong answer to the question — and that we will be dealing with the consequences of their mistakes for decades to come, not just economically, as companies lose their creative flair, but also politically, as professional elites join the ranks of the angry and alienated.

Companies will evolve in radically different directions according to the answer that they give to this question. Choose the first answer and they will evolve into “panopticons.” Managers will use Al’s growing powers to divide jobs into identical units, monitor and measure workers in terms of their ability to fulfill their assigned roles, and get rid of surplus workers. The faster you work, the more you will be rewarded.

This type of organization is hardly new. The father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, coined the term “panopticon” in 1791 to describe his ideal prison in which a few managers could monitor everything that their inmates did. The father of scientific management, Frederick Taylor, taught employers the importance of standardization and measurement of workflows in the early 20" century. But today’s digital Taylorism takes all this to a new level. It ensures that the managerial eye is all-seeing, enabling employers to monitor not just your every movement but your fleeting emotions. And it hands enormous power to algorithms that are untouched by human emotion.