Human augmentation, not replacement: A research agenda for AI and robotics in the industry

When talking about the threats of work automation through robotics and/or AI, the topic of human replacement is often the first to show up. If it is sometimes seen as something positive, it often revives the collective fear of people losing their jobs, a fear that has been continuously entertained through political discourse against immigration (Goldberg, 2015). The difference being that the threat is now machine that is thought to be much more productive than humans or, even, on the verge of becoming more intelligent than them: The so-called technology singularity (Kurzweil, 2005). In this position paper, we argue that the singularity myth has a negative influence on the current research agenda in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Indeed, if complete human replacement is more a myth than a reality, new technologies are altering the way that we work, posing new challenges for the way we manage human-machine interactions, including work alienation, decision-making power and fairness that require attention. We call for greater attention to augmentation technologies that empower humans rather than mechanize and deskill them. We lay out the advantages of such a path, stressing that the industry can truly benefit from new technologies when human-machine complementarity is leveraged.