As part of the 2024 ESCP Impact papers series, my colleague Howard Zhong and I were happy to contribute with a piece pleading for augmentation over automation.
One major challenge for the years to come, both from a business and a societal perspective, will be to strike a good balance between augmentation and automation of human labor with AI (and Generative AI in particular).
On one side, automation has clear limits, like perpetuating biases and lacking adaptability. On the other side, augmentation has clear advantages like improving work quality, job satisfaction, and labor demand.
However, both augmentation and automation have negative effects (privacy, security, job destruction, and environmental impact), which should be balanced through laws and regulations.
We propose three actions for corporations to navigate the automation/augmentation trade-off and highlight three issues on the European agenda associated with negative externalities triggered by AI technologies.
