It’s an important question—and one that has had a very rigorous exploration in Alan Pelz-Sharpe’s latest ‘Ethical Innovation’ column for KMWorld magazine.

For Alan—ex Ovum and 451, and who now heads up an advisory firm focused solely on disruption and innovation in information management, Deep Analysis—now is definitely time to start seriously considering these issues.

His starting point is that while in a technical briefing with a software vendor, the following rather startling question was posed: “How many resources are required to execute that task—of course, that covers both humans and robots?”