The Automation Maturity model – Marty, where is my flying omniscient personal assistant?

As stories of robot teachers (2010), AI game-show winners (2011), Big Data election victories (2012) objects communicating with one another (2013), self-driving cars (2014), robot-run hotels (2015), delivery drones (2016) have become the new normal, the outgoing Obama administration has made policy recommendations premised on a future American economy deeply affected by AI-driven automation, with 47% of US jobs estimated to be at high-risk of computerization in the next 20 years. It's perhaps therefore unsurprising that there is an abundance of words, terminology and concepts floating around the automation and artificial intelligence sphere, often achieving'buzzword' status and cited in isolation – when really they ought to be considered in concert. We can think of automation as being the consolidation of a number of such'concepts', intertwined and often related to one another: this is my take on how some of these fit together and the level of maturity that flows therefrom. We begin by plotting the number and complexity of tasks performed (X-axis) as part of each'concept' against the extent to which the behaviours exhibited are'human-like' (Y-axis). Next we demarcate a zoning of primary "operation modes": concepts relating to direct interaction with humans (mode of interaction in green); gaining and producing knowledge (thinking in purple); and, finally, interaction with other systems (machine-machine interaction in orange).