3 research outputs found
Framework for Promoting Workforce Well-being in the AI-Integrated Workplace
The Partnership on AI’s “Framework for Promoting Workforce Well-being in the AI- Integrated Workplace” provides a conceptual framework and a set of tools to guide employers, workers, and other stakeholders towards promoting workforce well-being throughout the process of introducing AI into the workplace. As AI technologies become increasingly prevalent in the workplace, our goal is to place workforce wellbeing at the center of this technological change and resulting metamorphosis in work, well-being, and society, and provide a starting point to discuss and create pragmatic solutions. The importance of making a commitment to worker well-being in earnest has been highlighted by the COVID-19 public health and economic crises which exposed and exacerbated the long-standing inequities in the treatment of workers. Making sure those are not perpetuated further with the introduction of AI systems into the workplace requires deliberate efforts and will not happen automatically.
The Framework is designed to initiate and inform discussions on the impact of AI that strengthen the reciprocal obligations between workers and employers, specifically focusing on worker well-being.1 The four tools that make up the Framework are both interrelated and independent. Use of these tools will differ by implementing organization and will depend on multiple considerations, such as funding, ability to dedicate time, stage of AI integration, etc.
This paper draws upon existing work by academics, labor unions, and other institutions to explain why organizations should prioritize worker well-being. In doing so, it explores the need for a coherent AI and workforce well-being framework. It also attempts to account for different forms of AI integration into the workplace, outlines the different instances in which workers may encounter AI, and the technological aspects of AI that may impact workers.
Relevant literature has been synthesized into Six Pillars of Workforce Well-being that should be prioritized and protected throughout AI integration. Human rights is the first pillar, and supports all aspects of workforce well-being. The five additional pillars of well-being include physical, financial, intellectual, emotional well-being, as well as purpose and meaning
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An introduction to the history of AI: genealogies of power in the management age
Like the polar bear beleaguered by global warming, artificial intelligence (AI) serves as the charismatic megafauna of an entangled set of local and global histories of science, technology, and economics. This Themes issue develops a new perspective on AI that moves beyond conventional origin myths – AI was invented at Dartmouth in the summer of 1956, or by Alan Turing in 1950 – and reframes contemporary critique by establishing plural genealogies that situate AI within deeper histories and broader geographies. ChatGPT and art produced by AI like the image we have chosen for this issue cover are described as generative but are better understood as forms of pastiche based upon the use of existing infrastructures, often in ways that reflect stereotypes. The power of these tools is predicated on the fact that the Internet was first imagined and framed as a ‘commons’ when actually it has created a stockpile for centralized control over (or extraction and exploitation of) recursive, iterative, and creative work. As with most computer technologies, the ‘freedom’ and ‘flexibility’ that these tools promise also depends on a loss of agency, control, and freedom for many, in this case, the artists, writers, and researchers who have made their work accessible in this way. Thus, rather than fixate on the latest promissory technology or focus on a relatively small set of elite academic pursuits born out of a marriage between logic, statistics, and modern digital computing, we explore AI as a diffuse set of technologies and systems of epistemic and political power that participate in broader historical trajectories than traditionally offered, expanding the scope of what ‘history of AI’ is a history of.A.W. Mellon Foundation funded a Sawyer Seminar on Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power. The BJHS Themes issue this article introduces stems from work begun under its ambit