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21 October, 2015
Fall 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, two Oxford researchers, published their ‘Future of employment‘. A report that offers a grim perspective on just about any form of work in the future.
Computerisation is the word they use and what they perceive as a major threat to work in – again – just about any job. IT will be computerised, accounting will be computerised, manufacturing will be computerised, auditing will be computerised. A future wherein humans are practically replaceable and redundant in order to keep this world running.
The accountants work is what they call ‘susceptible’ for computerisation. Susceptible is usually a word you use in winter as in: if you don’t wear a warm coat in winter you are susceptible to catching a cold.
The problem they see however is more complex. I do not believe that the entire audit and accounting profession will be made obsolete by IT. I do believe that IT will take a huge chunk out of the work that these days is still done manually. I also believe that software will become smarter. If Google can drive a car, then why would it be impossible to automatically generate an annual account or even interpret an annual account? But still, the human factor, professional judgement, seeing things that machines can’t or vice versa interpret and understand the things a machine can see but human eyes cannot. That will still require the human factor or the human touch. At least I hope.
Accounting is an age old science or trick. Invented some 500 years ago by an Italian monk in Venice. And the merchants of the renaissance loved it. Debit and credit, double entry accounting was a huge step forward. The next level in accounting entered this world less than a generation ago. The spreadsheet was invented in the late seventies of the twentieth century. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston invented Visicalc, the first real spreadsheet, back in 1979. Calculations took remarkably less time.. ‘Visicalc took 20 hours of work per week for some people and turned it out in 15 minutes,’ is what Dan Bricklin tells us in an interview and he adds a remarkable and extremely important statement: ‘and let them become much more creative.’ That is where the real challenge is!
