Disrupting even the world of academics

ACADEMICS have two large, overarching tasks: creating original knowledge and getting it published so that others can benefit from it. Their work is time consuming, with professors involved in creative speculations, synthesising huge bodies of research, generating hypotheses, modelling, collecting data and editing their research papers for publication. Add to this their obligations to prepare pedagogical materials and lesson plans, teach and write INSEAD Knowledge articles, and professors become very busy people.

But it is only a matter of time before the "algorithm" - currently disrupting industries from hotels to car sharing - takes its place in the academic's office, according to Phil Parker, INSEAD's chaired professor of management science. "There has been more and more automation slowly taking place. Now it's accelerating, and many people are not going to wait 10 years for an academic paper to be produced. Perhaps it can be produced much faster and also across hundreds of subjects that wouldn't have been covered if not for automation," he said after a recent talk at INSEAD on automation in academia.

Prof Parker reckoned that automation can replace much of the work that academics currently do, potentially achieving quantum leaps in academic productivity in the same way that Taylorism affected the manufacturing industry over 100 years ago.