Report by Martin Neil Baily, Erik Brynjolfsson, Anton Korinek: “ Large language models such as ChatGPT are emerging as powerful tools that not only make workers more productive but also increase the rate of innovation, laying the foundation for a significant acceleration in economic growth. As a general purpose technology, AI will impact a wide array of industries, prompting investments in new skills, transforming business processes, and altering the nature of work. However, official statistics will only partially capture the boost in productivity because the output of knowledge workers is difficult to measure. The rapid advances can have great benefits but may also lead to significant risks, so it is crucial to ensure that we steer progress in a direction that benefits all of society…(More)”.
AI in Hiring and Evaluating Workers: What Americans Think
Pew Research Center survey: “… finds crosscurrents in the public’s opinions as they look at the possible uses of AI in workplaces. Americans are wary and sometimes worried. For instance, they oppose AI use in making final hiring decisions by a 71%-7% margin, and a majority also opposes AI analysis being used in making firing decisions. Pluralities oppose AI use in reviewing job applications and in determining whether a worker should be promoted. Beyond that, majorities do not support the idea of AI systems being used to track workers’ movements while they are at work or keeping track of when office workers are at their desks.
Yet there are instances where people think AI in workplaces would do better than humans. For example, 47% think AI would do better than humans at evaluating all job applicants in the same way, while a much smaller share – 15% – believe AI would be worse than humans in doing that. And among those who believe that bias along racial and ethnic lines is a problem in performance evaluations generally, more believe that greater use of AI by employers would make things better rather than worse in the hiring and worker-evaluation process.
Overall, larger shares of Americans than not believe AI use in workplaces will significantly affect workers in general, but far fewer believe the use of AI in those places will have a major impact on them personally. Some 62% think the use of AI in the workplace will have a major impact on workers generally over the next 20 years. On the other hand, just 28% believe the use of AI will have a major impact on them personally, while roughly half believe there will be no impact on them or that the impact will be minor…(More)”.
Workforce ecosystems and AI
Report by David Kiron, Elizabeth J. Altman, and Christoph Riedl: “Companies increasingly rely on an extended workforce (e.g., contractors, gig workers, professional service firms, complementor organizations, and technologies such as algorithmic management and artificial intelligence) to achieve strategic goals and objectives. When we ask leaders to describe how they define their workforce today, they mention a diverse array of participants, beyond just full- and part-time employees, all contributing in various ways. Many of these leaders observe that their extended workforce now comprises 30-50% of their entire workforce. For example, Novartis has approximately 100,000 employees and counts more than 50,000 other workers as external contributors. Businesses are also increasingly using crowdsourcing platforms to engage external participants in the development of products and services. Managers are thinking about their workforce in terms of who contributes to outcomes, not just by workers’ employment arrangements.
Our ongoing research on workforce ecosystems demonstrates that managing work across organizational boundaries with groups of interdependent actors in a variety of employment relationships creates new opportunities and risks for both workers and businesses. These are not subtle shifts. We define a workforce ecosystem as:
A structure that encompasses actors, from within the organization and beyond, working to create value for an organization. Within the ecosystem, actors work toward individual and collective goals with interdependencies and complementarities among the participants.
The emergence of workforce ecosystems has implications for management theory, organizational behavior, social welfare, and policymakers. In particular, issues surrounding work and worker flexibility, equity, and data governance and transparency pose substantial opportunities for policymaking.
At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI)—which we define broadly to include machine learning and algorithmic management—is playing an increasingly large role within the corporate context. The widespread use of AI is already displacing workers through automation, augmenting human performance at work, and creating new job categories…(More)”.
The Technology/Jobs Puzzle: A European Perspective
Blog by Pierre-Alexandre Balland, Lucía Bosoer and Andrea Renda as part of the work of the Markle Technology Policy and Research Consortium: “In recent years, the creation of “good jobs” – defined as occupations that provide a middle-class living standard, adequate benefits, sufficient economic security, personal autonomy, and career prospects (Rodrik and Sabel 2019; Rodrik and Stantcheva 2021) – has become imperative for many governments. At the same time, developments in industrial value chains and in digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) create important challenges for the creation of good jobs. On the one hand, future good jobs may not be found only in manufacturing, ad this requires that industrial policy increasingly looks at services. On the other hand, AI has shown the potential to automate both routine and also non-routine tasks (TTC 2022), and this poses new, important questions on what role humans will play in the industrial value chains of the future. In the report drafted for the Markle Technology Policy and Research Consortium on The Technology/Jobs Puzzle: A European Perspective, we analyze Europe’s approach to the creation of “good jobs”. By mapping Europe’s technological specialization, we estimate in which sectors good jobs are most likely to emerge, and assess the main opportunities and challenges Europe faces on the road to a resilient, sustainable and competitive future economy.The report features an important reflection on how to define job quality and, relatedly “good jobs”. From the perspective of the European Union, job quality can be defined along two distinct dimensions. First, while the internationally agreed definition is rather static (e.g. related to the current conditions of the worker), the emerging interpretation at the EU level incorporates the extent to which a given job leads to nurturing human capital, and thereby empowering workers with more skills and well-being over time. Second, job quality can be seen from a “micro” perspective, which only accounts for the condition of the individual worker; or from a more “macro” perspective, which considers whether the sector in which the job emerges is compatible with the EU’s agenda, and in particular with the twin (green and digital) transition. As a result, we argue that ideally, Europe should avoid creating “good” jobs in “bad” sectors, as well as “bad” jobs in “good” sectors. The ultimate goal is to create “good” jobs in “good” sectors….(More)”
Data and Democracy at Work: Advanced Information Technologies, Labor Law, and the New Working Class
Book by Brishen Rogers: “As our economy has shifted away from industrial production and service industries have become dominant, many of the nation’s largest employers are now in fields like retail, food service, logistics, and hospitality. These companies have turned to data-driven surveillance technologies that operate over a vast distance, enabling cheaper oversight of massive numbers of workers. Data and Democracy at Work argues that companies often use new data-driven technologies as a power resource—or even a tool of class domination—and that our labor laws allow them to do so.
Employers have established broad rights to use technology to gather data on workers and their performance, to exclude others from accessing that data, and to use that data to refine their managerial strategies. Through these means, companies have suppressed workers’ ability to organize and unionize, thereby driving down wages and eroding working conditions. Labor law today encourages employer dominance in many ways—but labor law can also be reformed to become a tool for increased equity. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent Great Resignation have indicated an increased political mobilization of the so-called essential workers of the pandemic, many of them service industry workers. This book describes the necessary legal reforms to increase workers’ associational power and democratize workplace data, establishing more balanced relationships between workers and employers and ensuring a brighter and more equitable future for us all…(More)”.
Work and meaning in the age of AI
Report by Daniel Susskind: “It is often said that work is not only a source of income but also of meaning. In this paper, I explore the theoretical and empirical literature that addresses this relationship between work and meaning. I show that the relationship is far less clear than is commonly supposed: There is a great heterogeneity in its nature, both among today’s workers and workers over time. I explain why this relationship matters for policymakers and economists concerned about the impact of technology on work. In the short term, it is important for predicting labour market outcomes of interest. It also matters for understanding how artificial intelligence (AI) affects not only the quantity of work but its quality as well: These new technologies may erode the meaning that people get from their work. In the medium term, if jobs are lost, this relationship also matters for designing bold policy interventions like the ‘Universal Basic Income’ and ‘Job Guarantee Schemes’: Their design, and any choice between them, is heavily dependent on policymakers’—often tacit—assumptions about the nature of this underlying relationship between work and meaning. For instance, policymakers must decide whether to simply focus on replacing lost income alone (as with a Universal Basic Income) or, if they believe that work is an important and non-substitutable source of meaning, on protecting jobs for that additional role as well (as with a Job Guarantee Scheme). In closing, I explore the challenge that the age of AI presents for an important feature of liberal political theory: the idea of ‘neutrality.’..(More)”
Human-AI Teaming
Report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “Although artificial intelligence (AI) has many potential benefits, it has also been shown to suffer from a number of challenges for successful performance in complex real-world environments such as military operations, including brittleness, perceptual limitations, hidden biases, and lack of a model of causation important for understanding and predicting future events. These limitations mean that AI will remain inadequate for operating on its own in many complex and novel situations for the foreseeable future, and that AI will need to be carefully managed by humans to achieve their desired utility.
Human-AI Teaming: State-of-the-Art and Research Needs examines the factors that are relevant to the design and implementation of AI systems with respect to human operations. This report provides an overview of the state of research on human-AI teaming to determine gaps and future research priorities and explores critical human-systems integration issues for achieving optimal performance…(More)”
Which Connections Really Help You Find a Job?
Article by Iavor Bojinov, Karthik Rajkumar, Guillaume Saint-Jacques, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Sinan Aral: “Whom should you connect with the next time you’re looking for a job? To answer this question, we analyzed data from multiple large-scale randomized experiments involving 20 million people to measure how different types of connections impact job mobility. Our results, published recently in Science Magazine, show that your strongest ties — namely your connections to immediate coworkers, close friends, and family — were actually the least helpful for finding new opportunities and securing a job. You’ll have better luck with your weak ties: the more infrequent, arm’s-length relationships with acquaintances.
To be more specific, the ties that are most helpful for finding new jobs tend to be moderately weak: They strike a balance between exposing you to new social circles and information and having enough familiarity and overlapping interests so that the information is useful. Our findings uncovered the relationship between the strength of the connection (as measured by the number of mutual connections prior to connecting) and the likelihood that a job seeker transitions to a new role within the organization of a connection.The observation that weak ties are more beneficial for finding a job is not new. Sociologist Mark Granovetter first laid out this idea in a seminal 1973 paper that described how a person’s network affects their job prospects. Since then, the theory, known as the “strength of weak ties,” has become one of the most influential in the social sciences — underpinning network theories of information diffusion, industry structure, and human cooperation….(More)”.
The Labor Market Consequences of Appropriate Technology
Paper by Gustavo de Souza: “Developing countries rely on technology created by developed countries. This paper demonstrates that such reliance increases wage inequality but leads to greater production in developing countries. I study a Brazilian innovation program that taxed the leasing of international technology to subsidize national innovation. I show that the program led firms to replace technology licensed from developed countries with in-house innovations, which led to a decline in both employment and the share of high-skilled workers. Using a model of directed technological change and technology transfer, I find that increasing the share of firms that patent in Brazil by 1 p.p. decreases the skilled wage premium by 0.02% and production by 0.2%…(More)”.
Does AI Debias Recruitment? Race, Gender, and AI’s “Eradication of Difference”
Paper by Eleanor Drage & Kerry Mackereth: “In this paper, we analyze two key claims offered by recruitment AI companies in relation to the development and deployment of AI-powered HR tools: (1) recruitment AI can objectively assess candidates by removing gender and race from their systems, and (2) this removal of gender and race will make recruitment fairer, help customers attain their DEI goals, and lay the foundations for a truly meritocratic culture to thrive within an organization. We argue that these claims are misleading for four reasons: First, attempts to “strip” gender and race from AI systems often misunderstand what gender and race are, casting them as isolatable attributes rather than broader systems of power. Second, the attempted outsourcing of “diversity work” to AI-powered hiring tools may unintentionally entrench cultures of inequality and discrimination by failing to address the systemic problems within organizations. Third, AI hiring tools’ supposedly neutral assessment of candidates’ traits belie the power relationship between the observer and the observed. Specifically, the racialized history of character analysis and its associated processes of classification and categorization play into longer histories of taxonomical sorting and reflect the current demands and desires of the job market, even when not explicitly conducted along the lines of gender and race. Fourth, recruitment AI tools help produce the “ideal candidate” that they supposedly identify through by constructing associations between words and people’s bodies. From these four conclusions outlined above, we offer three key recommendations to AI HR firms, their customers, and policy makers going forward…(More)”.