Those workers – which have rapidly become commonplace in everything from logistics centres to police forces and automotive manufacturing plants – have been programmed for a range of situations but will never fully replace humans, noted Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which represents over 200 million workers in 163 countries.
“Many employers who started off with
the romance of robotry now understand that it’s about augmented workforces,” she told a recent Sydney Dialogue panel discussion monaco cell phone database about the issues raised by ever-improving AI-based process automation.
“It’s about the technology that allows workers to do their job much easier, much safer, and more inclusively,” she said, citing the example of disabled workers that had traditionally been able to work in manufacturing settings.
To accommodate the broad demographic mix in today’s
workforce – and to enable businesses to take advantage of a more diverse set of skills – she said it was important that AI’s development engage with previously marginalised groups.
“The notion that you could have a fully robotic workforce is still something of science fiction, and should remain there,” she said.
“We ask that workers are at the design table, giving the company the benefit of their experience and their knowledge about process, but also being part of the solutions.”
A lack of diversity in engineering and robotics – where women comprise less than 10 per cent of workers – risks limiting the application of innovative techniques and missing out on potential game-changing solutions.
“What are the solutions that we’re not even thinking about because we have such a non-diverse pool of people who are developing those technologies?” pointed out Dr Sue Keay, chair of the Robotics Australia Group.
“There are a number of ways that we can
try and address biases in the way these technologies are created, including deliberately programming the technologies to be more representative, and testing them to ensure they aren’t unfairly discriminating against people.”
“For these technologies to develop in a healthy and sustainable way,” she added, “we really need to see a lot more pressure for corporate social responsibility standards to apply – and to make sure companies are held to account for the type of technologies they’re creating to make sure that bias isn’t creeping into algorithms.”