Artificial Intelligence is becoming your boss, what’s the danger?

AI tools are already widely used in the gig economy and are rapidly making their way into other fields of Artificial Intelligence. What does this mean for your work?

(Deutsche Welle Chinese website) After 33-year-old Rodrigues (Renan Rodrigues) worked as a food delivery driver for the Swiss express company Smood for about a year and a half, the “robot” took over. According to his description, the algorithm-driven app schedules deliveries and shifts for him and his colleagues.

Rodriguez told DW that Smood has been using such software since he started working there in 2020. According to him, the “robot” became fully responsible for arranging his daily working day, and the need for a human manager no longer seemed possible.

Robot App

The goal of this “robot” app is to organize deliveries in the most efficient way possible. That works from an employer’s perspective, Rodriguez acknowledged. When he first started at the company in the Swiss town of Yverdon-les-Bains, there were usually about two deliveries an hour, he said. By the time he left, it had reached four or five times.

“I quickly understood that on a human level, it would be a disaster,” Rodriguez told DW. He sees “robots” pitting employees against each other. The fastest, best-performing drivers get more deliveries. Eventually, he said, he found himself with less work to do. His gig contract didn’t guarantee him a minimum number of hours or a fixed monthly salary, and he found it difficult to predict his income.

“The worst thing for me was telling me that when I was being tracked by the GPS system, there was a stopwatch running all the time, monitoring my speed and so on,” he said. This created what he called “social pressure”. When picking up the meal, he would not greet the restaurant owner, but yell at them to hurry up, and after running in, he ran out quickly. “It’s sad for people.”

Dealing with bots

What Rodriguez and his colleagues call “bots,” also known as algorithmic management, is the use of computer programs to make work decisions. It is a type of artificial intelligence (AI). According to the European Commission, artificial intelligence refers to “systems that display intelligent performance by analyzing their environment and taking actions – with a certain degree of autonomy – to achieve specific goals”.

The use of algorithmic management is particularly relevant to the gig economy, where companies such as Uber and Delivered often employ freelance or zero-hour contract workers.

Artificial Intelligence Tools

In fact, AI tools are rapidly making their way into every sector of the economy. White-collar office work can be used for recruiting or performance tracking. A 2022 survey of 1,000 companies by professional services consultancy PwC found that between one-sixth and one-fourth of companies had used a company-wide tool to recruit or retain employees in the past 12 months of Artificial Intelligence. Some 40 percent of the companies most advanced in using AI are using it to improve employee experience and skill acquisition or to increase productivity.

Companies can use data about employees or job candidates in a number of ways, as highlighted in a report last year by Open Mind, the nonprofit of Spanish bank BBVA: Reviewing workers for jobs and promotions, identifying when people are likely to leave, and selecting future leaders. People analytics is also being used to manage worker performance.”

Artificial Intelligence American Companies

Take HI Revue, an American company, for example. According to its website, the company has more than 800 customers, including large multinational companies such as Amazon, G4S, and Unilever. The company claims that using video job interviews can dramatically speed up hiring, offer candidates more flexibility and make hiring fairer. It also said algorithms could be trained to remove the unconscious racial and gender biases that are common among human recruiters. Citing the example of British client Co-Operative Bank, HireVue said that algorithmic tools helped to reduce gender bias in favor of men from 70/30 to 50/50, achieving gender parity.

In recent years, however, some experts and journalists have pointed out the risk of reproducing racism, ability discrimination, or sexism in AI recruitment. A US study last year found that robots trained in artificial intelligence repeatedly discriminated against women and non-whites.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has even issued guidance on the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace, warning that the “use of these tools may disadvantage job applicants and employees with disabilities.” For example, they might get a low score on a test that requires a high degree of keyboard dexterity.

Artificial Intelligence Ongoing Legal Reform

In the European Union, there are two key pieces of legislation underway that will affect. How AI is deployed at work the European Commission emphasized that. In general, artificial intelligence can bring benefits to citizens and businesses, but it also poses risks to people’s fundamental rights.

Employment, worker management, and self-employment are specifically mentioned as high-risk uses under the proposed AI bill. For manufacturers and purchasers of such AI tools. The law should stipulate specific obligations before the products go on the market, mainly conformity assessment.

Such testing will scrutinize the quality of the datasets used to train AI systems (undertrained systems can produce biased results).  Transparency provisions for buyers, and the level of human oversight. Once a product enters the market, AI developers will also have oversight obligations.

Aida Ponce Del Castillo of the European Trade Union Institute said that from a worker’s perspective. AI legislation doesn’t specifically regulate how your boss can use it. “This is a missed opportunity.” The researcher told DW that the onus falls on the seller of the technology. Certain technologies will be banned outright under the AI ​​bill — such as. The “social scoring” system is linked to the Chinese government — but that’s not yet specific to the workplace.

Castillo said the second piece of relevant legislation on the horizon is the platform work order. It has a chapter dedicated to algorithmic governance. But as the name suggests, it only covers the estimated 28 million workers in the EU platform industry. According to the European Commission, the proposed law “increases the transparency of the use of algorithms by digital labor platforms. Ensures human oversight of their respect for working conditions, and empowers the right to contest automated decisions”.

Artificial Intelligence

Castillo said the draft laws – both still in the process of passing through. The EU legislative process – should give workers the tools to challenge their bosses over potentially problematic uses of artificial intelligence. But she cautions that they don’t have to be banned entirely. Two thing she thinks should be banned are emotion-reading technology. (one of the most controversial uses of AI With many experts skeptical that emotions are simple or common enough to measure). The suspension of the accounts of gig workers like Uber drivers.

“I don’t want to say that artificial intelligence is bad. I’ve dedicated 20 years of my life to technical research in this area.” It’s always about managing human risk, Castillo said.

A former delivery driver, Rodriguez’s views on “robots” are clear. He thinks there should be more regulation of what companies can and cannot do. He admitted that he was fired from Snood. But Rodriguez explained he didn’t mind. Because he had already secured a training contract for his dream job as a train driver.