What Machines Can't Do (Yet) in Real Work Settings

Almost 30 years ago, Bob Thomas, then an MIT professor, published a book called "What Machines Can't Do." He was focused on manufacturing technology and argued that it wasn't yet ready to take over the factory from humans. While recent developments with artificial intelligence have raised the bar considerably since then for what machines can do, there are still many things that they can't do yet or at least not do well in highly reliable ways. AI systems may perform well in the research lab or under highly controlled application settings, but they still needed human help in the types of real-world work settings we researched for a new book, Working With AI: Real Stories of Human-Machine Collaboration. Human workers were very much in evidence across our 30 case studies.