They may sound a bit cheeky, but those humans are us. I was happy when a client had asked something and I realised I didn't have to do it because our machine learning platform had already what was requested.

We had built it precisely to free us from certain repetitive things in machine learning projects [environment set up, near real-time collaboration on notebooks, scheduling long-running notebooks, experiment tracking, model deployment and monitoring]. We used to scramble and do all that, request help from our colleagues and pull them from what they were doing. This was really taxing and bad for morale, jumping around from one context to another.

I had a huge smile contemplating all the work I was about to not do.

There are many things where the humans themselves ought to be "augmented". Case in point, in some projects involving predictive maintenance, the stakes of an incident can be around $100MM and all these processes depend on a human being alert at all times during their very long shift, with a bunch of other things happening simultaneously. This is very stressful and these people actually want to be "augmented". They want something to help them and catch things they would have missed because they haven't had proper sleep or were too busy solving another urgent and important problem. It is the people themselves who come to us and ask us for our help to help them solve these problems.

It may sound cheeky, and in many cases at many companies it is cheeky and it is PR like saying "partners" instead of "drivers", or "dashers" instead of "delivery person". In some cases it really is what happens. At least from my biased perspective with the actual humans who were asking for "augmentation" to do their job.

Which is true, but those pesky humans, it turns out that really replacing them is soooo tricky!! They end up hanging around in the business process spending money and whining about how evil you are, and all the time your competitors are bolstering their employees capabilities making then happier and more productive and pushing wishy washy messages of corporate social responsibility at your customers.

I think the goal of all technology is not only to reduce cost (replace humans) but to improve the job they do — make them faster, stronger, smarter. IMO the enhancement part of the tech evolution equation has been much underconsidered.

Any time a tool evolves, it changes not only how a task is done but also why. In the case of implementing a business process, the revision process is best served by reconsidering why what is done now and taking the opportunity to evolve the old role into making a richer contribution that introduces a new and improved path through the problem space.

That's IA, and IMO, it's the Great White Hope that AI might yet lead to a future world that engages humans more rather than the default dystopia where we're all redundant and irrelevant.