Commentary: A meeting a day keeps the robots away

Predictions that white-collar work will soon be automated reveal an underappreciation of what other people’s jobs entail, says Sarah O’Connor for Financial Times.

Asian business person having a meeting stock photo. (Photo: iStock/kazuma seki)

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LONDON: It is not often that someone makes a prediction that strikes you as profoundly incorrect yet also quite useful.

But so it was when Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman told the FT that “white-collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person – most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months”.

It is not clear whether he meant that AI would actually have swept away all this work in 12 to 18 months, or just that it would be capable of doing so. Either way, bold predictions like these reveal an underappreciation of what other people’s jobs actually entail.

Tech leaders are particularly susceptible to this error but, to an extent, we all do it, which is why people often say in surveys that AI will probably replace a lot of jobs but not theirs.

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