The long-held fear that AI and robotics will entirely replace human workers may be hitting a wall of practical reality. Today’s cutting-edge of automation isn’t replacing the whole human but absorbing their most mundane tasks.
That is the consensus from Dave Bozeman, chief executive of third-party logistics giant C.H. Robinson, and Peggy Johnson, chief executive of Agility Robotics, speaking Tuesday at Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Aspen, Colorado. While both executives acknowledged deep societal anxiety around job displacement, they argued that the immediate future belongs to so-called task augmentation, allowing humans to move higher up the value chain.