Tag: Futures

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(Featured) The Ethical Implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) For Meaningful Work

The Ethical Implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) For Meaningful Work

In the realm of artificial intelligence (AI) deployment, a neglected ethical concern is the impact of AI on meaningful work. Sarah Bankins and Paul Formosa focus on this critical aspect, emphasizing that understanding the consequences of AI on meaningful work for the remaining workforce is as significant as examining the impact of AI-induced unemployment. Meaningful work plays a crucial role in human well-being, autonomy, and flourishing, rendering it an essential ethical dimension.

The authors investigate three paths of AI deployment: replacing tasks, ‘tending the machine’, and amplifying, across five dimensions of meaningful work: task integrity, skill cultivation and use, task significance, autonomy, and belongingness. By employing this approach, they identify the ways AI may both enhance and undermine meaningful work experiences across the dimensions. Additionally, the authors draw upon ethical implications by utilizing five key ethical AI principles, providing practical guidance for organizations and suggesting opportunities for future research.

The paper concludes that AI has the potential to make work more meaningful for some workers by performing less meaningful tasks and amplifying their capabilities. However, it also highlights the risk of making work less meaningful for others by generating monotonous tasks, restricting worker autonomy, and disproportionately distributing AI benefits away from less-skilled workers. This dualistic impact suggests that AI’s future effects on meaningful work will be both significant and varied.

The authors’ analysis of AI and meaningful work raises broader philosophical issues. One such issue pertains to the value of work in the context of human dignity, self-realization, and social connection. As AI technologies advance, society will need to reflect on the meaning of work and redefine it in response to the changes brought about by these innovations. Furthermore, the ethical principles guiding AI development and deployment must not only ensure fair and equitable distribution of benefits but also preserve the essence of human engagement in work.

Future research in this area could explore the potential impact of AI on work’s existential value and its influence on the human experience. Researchers may also delve into the development of ethical frameworks that ensure AI technologies foster more meaningful work and equitable distribution of benefits. Finally, the potential outcomes and implications of artificial general intelligence (AGI) on meaningful work should be considered, as AGI could dramatically alter the landscape of human labor and the very nature of work itself.

Abstract

The increasing workplace use of artificially intelligent (AI) technologies has implications for the experience of meaningful human work. Meaningful work refers to the perception that one’s work has worth, significance, or a higher purpose. The development and organisational deployment of AI is accelerating, but the ways in which this will support or diminish opportunities for meaningful work and the ethical implications of these changes remain under-explored. This conceptual paper is positioned at the intersection of the meaningful work and ethical AI literatures and offers a detailed assessment of the ways in which the deployment of AI can enhance or diminish employees’ experiences of meaningful work. We first outline the nature of meaningful work and draw on philosophical and business ethics accounts to establish its ethical importance. We then explore the impacts of three paths of AI deployment (replacing some tasks, ‘tending the machine’, and amplifying human skills) across five dimensions constituting a holistic account of meaningful work, and finally assess the ethical implications. In doing so we help to contextualise the meaningful work literature for the era of AI, extend the ethical AI literature into the workplace, and conclude with a range of practical implications and future research directions.

The Ethical Implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) For Meaningful Work
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(Featured) Emotional AI and the future of wellbeing in the post-pandemic workplace

Emotional AI and the future of wellbeing in the post-pandemic workplace

Peter Mantello and Manh-Tung Ho examine the impact of emotional artificial intelligence (AI) technologies on employee-employer relationships, focusing on the case of Amazon Japan. The authors argue that the adoption of AI technologies for managing employee emotions can exacerbate pre-existing issues of precarity and worsen the already dire global economic situation. Although emotional AI is being touted as a way to combat stress-related work absences, it is based on the same neoliberal logic that creates these problems. The paper concludes that in order for emotional AI to play a positive role in the workplace, three essential steps must be taken: the technology must be designed to better understand human emotions, workers must have access and control over their data, and a more pluralistic approach to devising regulatory frameworks must be adopted.

The authors begin by discussing the growth of precarity and the worsening global economic situation, noting that these factors have led to an increased demand for emotion-sensing technologies. They examine the case of Amazon Japan, which has been embroiled in legal disputes due to its culturally insensitive performance improvement plan and general hostility towards collective bargaining. The authors argue that emotional AI is being uncritically adopted as a tool for combating stress-related work absences, without considering the underlying neoliberal logic and efficiency practices that contribute to these problems.

The authors then turn to the traditional Japanese work culture, which values loyalty over productivity and focuses on solidarity, consensus, long-term trust, and human growth. They argue that the adoption of AI-driven management systems signifies a lack of trust in workers, which challenges this traditional work culture. The authors suggest that emotional AI companies and policy makers would benefit from embracing a more pluralistic approach to devising regulatory frameworks that draw from both Eastern and Western value traditions.

This paper raises important questions about the role of emotional AI technologies in the workplace and their impact on employee-employer relationships. It also highlights the need to better understand the complexity of human emotions and to incorporate a greater range of modulators to account for diversity and particularity. Philosophers and researchers interested in the ethics of AI and its impact on society will find this paper to be a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate.

Future research could explore the impact of emotional AI on other aspects of the workplace, such as employee creativity and innovation. It could also examine the potential for emotional AI to exacerbate issues of bias and discrimination. Finally, future research could explore the implications of emotional AI technologies for the broader philosophical debate about the relationship between humans and machines.

Abstract

This paper interrogates the growing pervasiveness of affect recognition tools as an emerging layer human-centric automated management in the global workplace. While vendors tout the neoliberal incentives of emotion-recognition technology as a pre-eminent tool of workplace wellness, we argue that emotional AI recalibrates the horizons of capital not by expanding outward into the consumer realm (like surveillance capitalism). Rather, as a new genus of digital Taylorism, it turns inward, passing through the corporeal exterior to extract greater surplus value and managerial control from the affective states of workers. Thus, empathic surveillance signals a profound shift in the ontology of human labor relations. In the emotionally quantified workplace, employees are no longer simply seen as physical capital, but conduits of actuarial and statistical intelligence gleaned from their most intimate subjective states. As a result, affect-driven automated management means that priority is often given to actuarial rather than human-centered managerial decisions.

Emotional AI and the future of wellbeing in the post-pandemic workplace
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(Featured) How Neurotech Start-Ups Envision Ethical Futures: Demarcation, Deferral, Delegation

How Neurotech Start-Ups Envision Ethical Futures: Demarcation, Deferral, Delegation

Sophia Knopf, Nina Frahm, and Sebastian Pfotenhauer provide a thought-provoking exploration of the ethical considerations and implications that emerge within the context of direct-to-consumer (DTC) neurotechnology start-ups. The authors investigate how these companies approach and enact ethical considerations, particularly focusing on boundary-work and the strategic use of ethics to establish credibility, legitimacy, and autonomy in an unsettled and contested field. Through a series of interviews and qualitative analysis, the paper uncovers the various ways in which neurotechnology start-ups mobilize ethics to navigate the complex terrain between visionary promises and potential ethical hazards and risks.

The study highlights four dimensions of boundary-work that DTC neurotechnology start-ups engage in: actual vs. hypothetical issues, good vs. bad purposes and consequences, consumer safety vs. medical risk or harm, and sound science vs. overpromising. The authors suggest that ethics functions as a mediator, facilitating the articulation of visions of successful technologies and desirable futures. By framing ethics through boundary-work, the start-ups strategically defer certain ethical challenges to the future while delegating ethical reasoning to established knowledge regimes.

The authors propose that such framing of ethics allows the start-ups to construct desirable technology trajectories from the present into the future, establishing credibility and legitimacy in the field. In essence, the paper argues that ethics becomes a key ingredient in nascent knowledge-control regimes where the power to shape a specific understanding of ethics allocates rights and responsibilities, legitimizing certain visions of desirable socio-technical futures and neuro-innovation practices.

Relating this research to broader philosophical issues, we can observe that the questions raised in the paper touch upon the nature of ethics and responsibility in technological innovation. This resonates with wider discussions in philosophy regarding the ethics of emerging technologies, the role of expertise, and the co-construction of socio-technical futures. The paper illuminates the complex relationship between ethical considerations, stakeholder interests, and the shaping of technology and society, which has been a longstanding concern in philosophy of technology and science and technology studies.

The paper offers numerous potential avenues for further research and investigation. Future studies could explore how these ethical strategies and boundary-work practices compare to those employed in other emerging technology sectors. Another promising area of inquiry would be the examination of the potential effects of evolving regulatory frameworks and public discourse on the ethical practices of start-ups in DTC neurotechnology and beyond. Such research would further our understanding of the dynamic interplay between ethics, technology, and society in shaping our collective future.

Abstract

Like many ethics debates surrounding emerging technologies, neuroethics is increasingly concerned with the private sector. Here, entrepreneurial visions and claims of how neurotechnology innovation will revolutionize society—from brain-computer-interfaces to neural enhancement and cognitive phenotyping—are confronted with public and policy concerns about the risks and ethical challenges related to such innovations. But while neuroethics frameworks have a longer track record in public sector research such as the U.S. BRAIN Initiative, much less is known about how businesses—and especially start-ups—address ethics in tech development. In this paper, we investigate how actors in the field frame and enact ethics as part of their innovative R&D processes and business models. Drawing on an empirical case study on direct-to-consumer (DTC) neurotechnology start-ups, we find that actors engage in careful boundary-work to anticipate and address public critique of their technologies, which allows them to delineate a manageable scope of their ethics integration. In particular, boundaries are drawn around four areas: the technology’s actual capability, purpose, safety and evidence-base. By drawing such lines of demarcation, we suggest that start-ups make their visions of ethical neurotechnology in society more acceptable, plausible and desirable, favoring their innovations while at the same time assigning discrete responsibilities for ethics. These visions establish a link from the present into the future, mobilizing the latter as promissory place where a technology’s benefits will materialize and to which certain ethical issues can be deferred. In turn, the present is constructed as a moment in which ethical engagement could be delegated to permissive regulatory standards and scientific authority. Our empirical tracing of the construction of ‘ethical realities’ in and by start-ups offers new inroads for ethics research and governance in tech industries beyond neurotechnology.

How Neurotech Start-Ups Envision Ethical Futures: Demarcation, Deferral, Delegation