Artificial Intelligence
Collaborating with AI
Dr Bin Wang’s research explores the future of collaborating with AI – the decisions we make today that influence how we work with AI, and affect the nature of work in the future. Rapid advances in digital and intelligent technologies are redefining how work is done. Yet as much as the change feels rapid, we still need to carefully consider what we should (and shouldn’t) ask AI to do. Dr Wang’s research explores the challenges organisations face in their digital transformation journeys, and how they should ideally collaborate with AI - treating it not as a replacement for human labor, but as a partner in more adaptive, innovative, and sustainable ways of working.
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AI and societal wellbeing
Professor Fang Cooke’s ESRC-funded research program explores the role of digitalisation in economic and social wellbeing at a national level. The advance of AI and digitalisation is potentially being led by business or economic interests, and prioritised over societal interests such as safety, privacy and inclusion. As AI advances rapidly, Prof Cooke is exploring how governments have a critical role in ensuring digital safety and privacy, and enabling regulation that ensures society as a whole benefits from AI.
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AI's influence on how work is conducted
Professor Greg Bamber and a team are analysing investment by employers in AI, thanks to philanthropic research funding from the Prescott Family Foundation, and their international ESRC Digital Futures at Work Research Centre collaborators funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
Prof Bamber sees AI’s influence as a ‘mega-trend’ for work. Following disruptive innovations such as the advent of personal computers and microchips, AI can now begin to profoundly change how work is conducted and managed. Prof Bamber says that although AI is often promoted as ‘the future’ and ‘inevitable’, we should carefully consider AI’s increasing use in the surveillance of customers and workers, and the implications for workers’ and managers’ job security and wellbeing, as well as employment relations. For example, enterprises are increasingly using chatbots, agents, algorithms and automation to replace people, and some enterprises are using AI to monitor customers and workers in ways that raise ethical and privacy concerns, Prof Bamber adds.
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AI and the future of work
As workers consider an unsteady future in organisations, they are increasingly looking to other forms of work such as gig-work, or side-hustles in the gig economy. Professor Dayna Simpson, Dr Paul Zhou and Dr Margie Lee explore the growing role of services being delivered by workers in the gig economy. As labor that is performed by individuals outside of organisations, and through algorithm-mediated markets, this has major implications for the future of work. With funding from an ARC Discovery Project, researchers have identified numerous implications for the protection of gig workers, but also the depth of their motivation to continue working independently even under algorithmic control.