Automation eliminates value but not risk

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If you can automate something, you can’t monetise it. You automate, therefore, as a defensive strategy: because everyone else is automating, and if you don’t, your unit cost is higher.

Automation keeps you in business; it isn’t a business. If every function in your organisation can be reduced to an algorithm, it is game over.

But (rigorous and competently executed) automation can remove micro-risks — risks that are intrinsic/internal to the process being automated; you can iron out the inconsistencies, foibles and errors of the meatware — but not the extrinsic risks that arise from the interaction of your new automated process with the outside world. those are emergent risks, impossible to see at the level of the process (certainly when a machine is carrying out that process), but that are a function of complexity.

See also

• Proprietary information
• Artificial intelligence