On 14-15 September 2017, Yury Mikhailov, Head of CONSORT Group’s St Petersburg office, took part in the discussions within the framework of the Federal IT Forum of the Russian oil and gas industry “Smart Oil & Gas: Digital Transformation of the Oil and Gas Industry”.
This large-scale industry event was held for the third time already, having proved to be a unique platform for discussing and exchanging best practice experience on major issues of IT and industrial automation in Russia’s oil and gas sector.
Yury was a speaker at a special session called Killer Robots that was devoted to the question of what could be done about those employees who would be gradually replaced with info-bots and automation systems.
The session participants tried to take a look into the future and offered their vision on the following issues:
• Was it possible to completely substitute humans in certain jobs with robots and info-bots
• How could people and robots coexist comfortably in a business environment
• Were special acts and regulations on the work of robots required or should they obey human laws
• Who would be held responsible for the robots’ mistakes (especially those that led to serious consequences)
• What could be done with the employees in non-complex jobs who would be replaced by robots and who were not capable of a more skilled work
• If the predictions that within the next decade robots’ IQ score would increase to 1,000 or more (as compared to 100 for an average human or 200 for a genius) were true, would not people become an oppressed minority
The speakers agreed that in the near future it will be possible to digitize and robotize those processes that can be easily algorithmized and represent a set of simple actions that are not based on deep analysis but rather provide general information or do a quick analysis to set key criteria. Where the role of thought processes for making comprehensive and weighted decisions was still great, and understanding of customer/consumer psychology was of paramount importance, digitalization would take place at a slower pace, and so, perhaps, despite the emergence of various chat bots and Vera personnel search bots, the recruiter’s position was not yet threatened with extinction.