1. Redesigning Geoscientific Work
through Cognitive Technologies
Valioso Ltd
London, UK

2. Apply cognitive technologies
Cognitive technologies, a product of the field of artificial
intelligence
Cognitive Technologies can and will be used to eliminate or it can empower the
geoscientist.
The oil and gas industry face choices about how to apply cognitive technologies.
These decisions will determine whether geoscientists are marginalized or
empowered. Whether the company is creating value or merely cutting costs.

3. Computer to perform tasks of humans
Play a game or get serious about it
Artificial intelligence researchers have sought to develop techniques to enable
computers to perform a wide range of tasks once thought to be solely the
domain of humans, including playing games, recognizing faces and speech,
making decisions under uncertainty, learning, and translating between
languages.

4. Commonly used cognitive technologies
Distinguish between artificial intelligence and
technologies emanate from cognitive technologies
• machine learning,
• computer vision,
• speech recognition,
• natural language processing, and
• robotics.

5. Era of Cognitive technologies require
redesigning of geoscientific work.
Industry leaders must understand the four main
automation choices and the cost and value strategies.
Over the next 3-5 years cognitive technologies will have profound impact on
geoscience, geoscientists, and oil and gas companies. These technologies can
and will be used to eliminate jobs. But they will also make it possible to redesign
work, creating new opportunities for geoscientists and greater value for oil and
gas companies and their customers.

6. Augment demand for skilled Geoscientists
Strong complementarities between machines and human
labor will increase productivity.
New technologies will increase productivity, which drives growth, and creates
demand for Geoscientists with new skills.
Gartner Group, forecast that “one in three jobs will be taken by software or
robots by 2025.
Challenge to substitute machines for geoscientists in tasks requiring
adaptability, common sense, and creativity remain immense.

7. Augment demand for reskilled Geoscientists
Strong complementarities between machines and human
labor will increase productivity.
In the next three to five years, parts of geoscientific jobs will be automated by
cognitive technologies. Geoscientists who are knowledge workers, will be
interacting with automated smart machines, as airline pilots and workers in
advanced factories do today.
For this reason, it is crucial for business leaders within the oil and gas industry
to take a closer look at the coming impact of cognitive technologies on
geoscientific work, geoscientists themselves, and their organizations.

8. Cognitive technologies and work automation
Three categories of application of Cognitive Technologies
From Deloitte University Press

9. Provide “intelligent” behavior, natural
interfaces and automation.
Product applications embed cognitive technologies
By integrating products that use cognitive
technologies into their business processes,
organizations are deploying process applications
Adopted from from Deloitte University Press

10. Direct impact on geoscientists whose jobs can
be fully or partly automated.
Automating an organization’s own work
Process applications use cognitive technologies to
enhance, scale, or automate business processes.
Examples of this include automating data entry
with automatic handwriting recognition,
automating planning and scheduling with
planning and optimization algorithms, and speech
recognition, natural language processing, and
question-answering technology.
Adopted from from Deloitte University Press

11. Combine computer vision and machine
learning algorithms to infer patterns
Automating insight
Insight applications use cognitive technologies to
reveal patterns, make predictions, and guide more
effective actions. Some insight applications can be seen
as a form of automation: The decision of what to do
next in a given situation, rather than being made by a
person, is being made by a machine. Other insight
applications enhance, rather than automate existing
decision making processes, or perform analyses that
were not being done before. Sometimes they join a
form of machine learning to other cognitive technology
such as computer vision.Adopted from from Deloitte University Press

12. Deskilling of Geoscientists
Risks of Cognitive System implementation
• Geoscientists tend to lose their skills if they are not practiced regularly. This
can lead to the ironic situation when the scientist himself need to take
command of an automated system.
• Poorly designed automation can reduce attention and performance on some
tasks.
• Studies have shown that in Seismic Interpretation, for instance, too much
automation, such as the use of auto tracking control, can make geoscientist,
especially less-skilled interpreters, less vigilant, reducing performance at
critical interpretation tasks.

13. Augment demand for reskilled Geoscientists
Oil and Gas Companies face automation choices
Parasuraman et al.
developed a framework to
analyze automation options.
It proposed that automation
can be applied to four broad
classes of functions:
1) information acquisition;
2) information analysis;
3) decision and action
selection; and
4) action implementation
Within each of
these types,
automation can be
applied across a
continuum of
levels from low to
high, that is, from
fully manual to
fully automatic
From Deloitte University Press

14. From fully manual to fully automatic
Automation can be applied across a continuum of levels
From Deloitte University Press

15. Consider the impact of cognitive automation
on creative or knowledge geoscientific work
From replace to empower: A talent-technology model
An automation design should be evaluated first by examining its consequences
on human performance and second by considering factors such as automation
reliability and the costs associated with the consequences of the actions or
decisions.
There is a need to use a framework that highlights the perspective of the
geoscientist affected by automation and enables us to assess the business
implications of various automation choices.

16. Consider the impact of cognitive automation
on creative or knowledge geoscientific work
Identify four main approaches to automation
Each of the four
choices entails
applying translation
technology in different
ways, with
correspondingly
different impacts on
the Geoscientist
Neither the type of job
nor the technology
used to automate it
necessarily determines
which automation
approach to follow.
This is a choice to be
made by systems
designers and, even
more importantly,
leaders and strategists.
Adopted from Deloitte University Press

17. Empower the Geoscientist and his work
Illustrate how the four automation choices play out on the
Geoscientist and one cognitive technology—machine
image processing
• In the replace approach, the entire job a geoscientist used to do, such as identify seismic
stratigraphic patterns, is eliminated, along with the geoscientist who did it.
• In the atomize/automate approach, machine image processing is used to perform much of the
work—imperfectly, given the current performance of machine image processing, then the
Geoscientist edit the automatically image processing results, a process called post-editing. Many
Geoscientist would consider this “janitorial work” and devaluation of their skills.
• A relieve approach might involve automating lower-value, uninteresting work and reassigning
Geoscientists to more challenging material where quality standards are higher, such as aquire
more knowledge related material to be used in training the image processing.
• In the empower approach Geoscientists use automated image processing tools to accelerate or
improve some of their tasks—such as suggesting several options for pattern recognition, but
leave the Geoscientist free to make choices. This increases productivity and quality while leaving
the geoscientist in control of the creative process and responsible for aesthetic judgments.

18. Organizations need to do more than sort
through the four main automation choices
Maximizing the value of workers and machines
To properly evaluate their options, organizations need to choose between a
cost strategy and a value strategy.
• A cost strategy uses technology to reduce costs, especially by reducing labor
• A value strategy aims to increase value by complementing labor with
technology or reassigning labor to higher-value work

19. Cognitive Technology augments demand for skilled
Geoscientists
What skills are required in a Cognitive era?
Routine tasks are increasingly subject to automation by cognitive and other
technologies, therefore skills in future demand will be:
• common sense,
• general intelligence,
• flexibility, and
• creativity
Emotional intelligence and empathy are likely to become relatively more
valuable to ensure successful interpersonal interactions.

20. Flexibility, creativity, critical thinking, and emotional
intelligence
More Valuable skills required amongst Geoscientist in the
future.
A number of skills are resistant to what computerization tend to require.
These include problem-solving, intuition, creativity, persuasion which is
required to perform “abstract” tasks, and situational adaptability, visual and
language recognition, and in-person interactions, required for “manual” tasks.
Cognitive technologies automate narrowly defined tasks, the skills and
temperament necessary to size up and execute broadly defined tasks, such as
critical thinking, general problem solving, tolerance of ambiguity, and
resourcefulness, are likely to become more valuable.

21. No substitute for the quality of experience provided by a well-trained and well-equipped
human possessed of a high emotional intelligence, energy, and empathy
Cognitive technologies make possible increasingly high-quality and personalized automatization
• The core task of creating something
novel, functional, or more efficient
requires not only technical skills specific
to a Geoscience, but also humanistic
skills of empathy and openness to
serendipity.
• Organizations that employ these skills to
understand and delight their human
customers have always been able to
distinguish themselves and will continue
to.

22. Valioso Ltd
www.Valioso.rocks
sak@Valioso.rocks
145-157 St John Street
EC1V4PW London
UK
Stig Arne Kristoffersen
Questions?
Feel free to contact us.
Computers remain better at providing
answers than at asking questions.
Insight starts with posing important
new questions.
Questioning the actions and decisions
of machines is essential to use them to
free us, rather than constrain us.