Samenvatting

Future work processes are going to change in several aspects. The working population (at least in Western European countries) is decreasing, while average age of employees increases. Their productivity is key to continuity in sectors like healthcare and manufacturing. Health and safety monitoring, combined with prevention measures must contribute to longer, more healthy and more productive working careers. The ‘tech-optimist’ approach to increase productivity is by means of automation and robotization, supported by IT, AI and heavy capital investments. Unfortunately, that kind of automation has not yet fulfilled its full promise as productivity enhancer as the pace of automation is significantly slower than anticipated and what productivity is gained -for instance in smart industry and healthcare- is considered to be ‘zero-sum’ as flexibility is equally lost (Armstrong et al., 2023). Simply ‘automating’ tasks too often leads to ‘brittle technology’ that is useless in unforeseen operational conditions or a changing reality. As such, it is unlikely to unlock high added-value. In healthcare industry we see “hardly any focus on research into innovations that save time to treat more patients.” (Gupta Strategists, 2021). Timesaving, more than classic productivity, should be the leading argument in rethinking the possibilities of human-technology collaboration, as it allows us to reallocate our human resources towards ‘care’, ’craft’ and ’creativity’.