People or Paper-Clips?

A cynic might say that The Department of Defence is about war, The Dept of Health about sickness and that Human Resources Depts. are about "resources" rather than people. Resources are things like paper clips. Surely humans are people and not resources?

In the future, the most effective people will only work for organisations who value people. In many areas of work, machines (and increasingly robots) are removing the drudge which ought to free up time for people to engage more with people. The jobs of the future that will rise will be increasingly about people to people activities e.g. tutoring, the performance arts, sales and in health care - the bed-side manner. In contrast, jobs will decline where things are very deterministic and about physical resources (and some might say its no bad thing that boring activities should be left to machines). People may choose to do a job that could be mechanised, or an economy may not be rich enough to invest in machines/robots or it may be that sometimes human-power is a more sustainable approach - but always people should not treated as machines and mere resources.

In the past, HR was called "personnel" so perhaps the future may be back-to-the-future. The author recently had the surreal experience of being wished well for the future, after working 20 years for an organisation, by a HR software-robot! Clearly, this should have been a person thing not a paper clip thing.

In the deep future however, machines may develop minds and perhaps the distinctions could blur. Perhaps a future machine may well be offended by the term HR. Offended by being categorised as a mere human and also by being treated as a mere resource!