Herman Cain might be singing “Imagine there’s no pizza,” but in the next 40 years, we might be singing “Imagine there’s no CEO,” says Nigel Rayner an analyst at Gartner. In a “maverick” presentation he argues that machines are better able to perform analytic tasks than humans and will eclipse human decision-making in the near future. Rayner says middle managers in particular are at risk for obsolescence. Here’s what we can look forward to: CFO and CEO tasks performed by machines, automated decision-making, a form of “enlightened capitalism,” and shareholders telling machines how they want the business to run.

This begs the question: If machines are doing all the work, where will that leave humans? Will “collective intelligence” trump human innovation?

Read more at ZDNet ^[1].