By Rex Huppke

Chicago Tribune

Imagine the future of the American workplace. First off, everyone has a jetpack. (There’s no evidence it will happen, I just really want it to happen.)

Next, the concept of a career has been redefined, and most workers move from company to company performing projects of varying lengths and being managed, at least in part, by artificial intelligence.

The jetpack bit might be far-fetched, but the roving worker/AI manager concept is likely on the horizon.

A study by the human resources company Randstad predicts that by 2019 as much as 50 percent of the U.S. workforce will be “agile workers” — defined as people working in a temporary, contract, consultant or freelance capacity.

Demand for this type of worker is growing. In a 2012 Randstad survey, 18 percent of companies said they were committed to building an “agile workforce.” In this year’s study, that figure jumped to 46 percent.

“Based on our own work experience in our own company and with our clients and customers, we expected the numbers to be up,” said Jim Link, chief HR officer for Randstad North America. “But I think the rate that some folks responded affirmatively to the survey surprised even us.”

So why is this happening? Clearly technology is part of it — workers are becoming more agile simply because they can. As people learn to work from anywhere, the concept of a job housed in an office becomes less central to our idea of what a career entails.

Also, as Link pointed out: “This year was the first time in our surveying where the more preferred benefit provided to employees was workplace flexibility. For years and years and years it has been health care and benefits or some version of that.”

The predicted shift is away from a career in the traditional sense and toward an ongoing series of “work experiences.”

A worker with particular skills is hired by a company to help with a short-term project. The company attracts the worker not just with pay but with an experience that will enhance the worker’s marketability. The company gets the best person for the work, the worker receives pay plus valuable experience and then moves on to other opportunities.

“You can go from an experience to an experience to an experience and never work for a company,” Link said. “We think work is going to shift more and more that way as this whole idea of agility continues to be a collection of experiences that an employee will gather throughout the course of their lives.”

I would argue that workers attached to a company for only a short time will be less concerned with building relationships with managers, opening the door for management via artificial intelligence. (Feel free to insert your own, “Seems like my manager is already artificially intelligent!” joke here.)

A recent Harvard Business Review article made the case for AI management, noting that bad human managers are so prevalent — and cause so many problems like low morale and employee disengagement — that “the bar is quite low.”

The authors, business psychology experts from University College London, examined computer-driven management and noted advantages like more direct feedback (devoid of bias) and better decision-making since the “human brain is incapable of translating the vast sea of data” available today.

“Computers and algorithms already have a lot of data on us,” said one of the authors, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic. “Imagine turning that data into accurate insights about us: Who we are, what we want, how we are feeling,and what we need to do. Then imagine that system giving us instructions: To buy, to sell, to e-mail someone, to work on something. Likewise, such a system would be able to give us feedback on our performance. What I just described is an AI manager. If you want a robot manager or ‘roboss,’ all you need is a hardware or physical body around the AI. ”

He said such a system would work best when combined with human intelligence, so workers wouldn’t report only to a computer.

The professor agreed an agile workforce would be well suited for this type of management because most people switch from traditional employment to self-employment to avoid having a boss, yet are not always able to manage themselves. Additionally, AI bosses will be cheaper than human bosses.

The future will be interesting. We’ll all be agile, and country music songs will include twangy gripes about how “my robot boss is a jerk.”

Me? I’m holding out for a jetpack.

— Chicago Tribune