Top 5 considerations before turning on your robots at work

At the Institute for Performance and Learning (I4PL) conference this year, I, along with my lead student-researcher, James McGinlay, presented initial findings of our ongoing federally funded research on the impact of newcomer and immigrant work ethic in workplaces with AI-enabled robots. There are many facets to this research and at this year’s session we presented our initial Top 5 considerations if your company decided to invest in robot implementation. We came to this list after hundreds of replicable tests using five different types of social robots situated in various locations that mimic different workplace environments. You will see some of our work on the Humology Lab’s YouTube channel.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay, and it is embedded in various devices starting with the phone you may be  using to read this post. There are many studies in AI and our work will contribute to this body of knowledge. We are looking at it from a more practical perspective though - a non-AI/robot (and sometimes non-techie) employee who though very good at their job now have to work side-by-side with an AI/robot, to enhance and augment their own work. With the pandemic, this has become a more realistic option for many reasons like physical distancing purposes. We have more research documents published in the coming year but for now, you can view our progress at the HumologyLab.com. Join our mailing list to get the latest reports, job aids, and fun activities everyone in your team (and even family) can be part of. In the coming year, there will be lunch-and-learns and other sessions you may want to consider for yourself and your organizations.

Our research team is not all about serious work though, we have our lighter side as well. Since it’s the holidays and most of us will be binge watching our favourite shows, we (James, Pandora, Rafael, and I) wanted to share with you our 40 popular robot-related original English-language movies of the last decade (and some older ones). This is by no-means an exhaustive list but instead a jumping point for you and your family, friends, and colleagues to discuss your thoughts about our future workplace and on ensuring that we live in a ‘humans first’ work environment. When you look at this list (and after viewing your desired movie), consider whether you agree or not in the placement of that movie in this grid, identify your reason, and let us know movies we didn’t include and where they will fall in this grid. We would be interested in hearing your thoughts on AI-enabled robots in the workplace as well as your personal movie favourites, especially non-English or translated ones.

So, we asked fifty of our friends and colleagues to validate this list. The idea was simple, is the movie Likely or Unlikely to happen and whether it falls in the Utopia or Dystopia category. But then there’s gradations - some movies are closer to the centre (0,0 being our reality now) and others are a bit more far-fetched for many reasons. We also wanted to only include movies with actual people and not pure animation (a combination being included).

* An accessible version of this image is available for download in the Attached Files section - Movies Showcasing the Likelihood of a Utopian AI-Robot World PDF document.

Grid considerations: With the Unlikely-Likely (Y) axis, a score of +20 would be the best representation of reality as we know it now and with reasonable assumptions about the future if the movie was set in the future. A score of 0 would be a situation that is possible but may not happen. A score of -20 would be something so unlike the state of AI now or in the future with the same reasonable assumptions that it is a complete fabrication of what might happen and not possible.

For the Dystopia-Utopia (X) axis, a score of 0 would be the closest representation of reality as we know it now. A score of +20 would be the perfect ideal of what our reality could look like (e.g. no wars/famine/poverty, mass prosperity for all), while a score of -20 would be absolute destruction on Earth (e.g. nuclear war, mass genocide, AI enslaving humans).

Assumptions include:

1. AI continuing to expand its reach but we still do not know to what extent or its adoption timeline,
2. governments taking a larger interest in AI technologies and that its most likely going to be more regulated and used (and are being used) for data analytics to create virtual profiles to track citizens,
3. eventually AI-enabled robots will be able to mimic and respond to genuine emotional responses in all situations given enough technological advancement, but still so far off that people are still able to tell the difference between a human response or a robot response.

For the selection of movies chosen, a forced comparison ranking system was used to give scores to each movie on each axis. Representations like Star Trek were given high likely/utopia scores because, comparatively and it being so far into the future, it would be reasonable to assume that technology may advance far enough to give us androids like the character Data. Representations like the Terminator Series was given low Likely (but not Unlikely) and high Dystopia scores because it may be possible in the future that AI may wage war on humans and create a dystopian reality, but we are aware of that possibility (through these types of representations) and will most likely create safeguards well before AI has sufficiently advanced to that level.

Tags:  ai  artificial intelligence  future  movies  robots  trends  workplace