{"id":2931,"date":"2019-09-23T09:56:55","date_gmt":"2019-09-23T09:56:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.sigmod.org\/?p=2931"},"modified":"2020-01-29T10:36:02","modified_gmt":"2020-01-29T10:36:02","slug":"imagine-all-the-people-and-ai-in-the-future-of-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wp.sigmod.org\/?p=2931","title":{"rendered":"Imagine all the People and AI in the Future of Work"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Shonan Village Workshop on FoW<\/a> Sep 8-12, 2019<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

We envision the Future of Work (FoW) to be a place where humans are empowered with the ability to rely on AI machines in an on-demand fashion, with ability to juggle diverse job opportunities that provide intellectual self-actualization, and enhance their capabilities by continuous knowledge and skill acquisition with a variety of onboarding and training tools. We recognize that the current view of \u201chumans-in-the-loop\u201d tends to see humans as machines, robots, or low-level agents used or exploited in the service of broader AI goals. Our hope is that people in their workplace in the future should be treated as fully human, with respect and dignity with the right to productive employment and the goal of bringing them back in the “frontier” of “humans-in-the-loop” systems.<\/strong> Such an environment will allow everyone everywhere to get a job online and offline, train for a new job, and get help from a mix of humans and AI machines. Ensuring portability between FoW marketplaces, and guaranteeing the protection of workers\u2019 rights, will play a major role in providing a rewarding and safe work environment to all. Existing platforms must rethink their design to empower humans and be at the frontier of FoW. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, humans’ relationship to work is changing as online job platforms are blurring the boundaries between physical and virtual workplaces.<\/strong> That is witnessed in freelancing platforms such as CrowdWorks<\/a> in Japan, TaskRabbit<\/a> and Fiverr in the USA, and Qapa<\/a> and MisterTemp<\/a> in France, crowdsourcing platforms such as Crowd4U<\/a> in Japan, Wirk<\/a>, and Prolific Academic<\/a> in Europe, Amazon Mechanical Turk<\/a> and Figure Eight<\/a> in the USA, and platforms that provide help with entrepreneurship such as de Asra<\/a> in India. Prospective employees can find temporary jobs in the physical world (e.g., a plumber, an event organizer, a gardener, can offer their jobs online), or in the form of virtual gigs (e.g., logo design, web programmer). Job providers can hire one or many individuals to achieve a task. The same person can take on those roles at any point in time. An employer can be a regular citizen who needs to hire a plumber, a social scientist needed to conduct population studies to verify some theories, a data scientist needing to validate a new algorithm, a domain expert seeking to verify how much interest a new product generates. The diversity of needs has given rise to a variety of platforms, all of which act as intermediaries between job providers and job seekers. Platforms differ in their ability to manage physical and virtual jobs, in their support for onboarding, socializing, training, and credentialing for employees, in automating the matching between jobs and workers. They also differ in the tools they offer to workers and job providers to express needs and requirements, and in their compliance with labor-related regulations and their handling of ethical concerns. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Human Factors at Work. <\/strong>FoW will witness an evolution of humans from being mere agents whose efforts and capabilities are used for the benefit of AI systems (broadly machines or business) to understanding psychological characteristics, attributes, skills, motivations, goals, etc. This will require capturing uncertainty in human behavior and individuals\u2019 evolving needs, and adapting offers to available demand.  Additionally, the attitudes, values, opinions regarding the processes, policies, and outcomes (e.g., perceptions of justice, fairness, bias, etc.) will need to be assessed and considered in the design of FoW ecosystems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Figure 1: A representation of human predictor variables at work and key outcome metrics <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Intellectual challenges of FoW<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

We envision that the FoW will be increasingly technology-driven and will have the potential to bring human concerns to the center of the design and deployment of job platforms. It is therefore crucial to keep ahead of this trend by addressing the intellectual challenges <\/em>that arise. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

IC1: Capturing Human Capabilities<\/strong>. The first challenge relates to the ability to understand different types of human roles in future jobs, modeling the inherent uncertainty in human behavior by understanding their evolving characteristics and be able to propose jobs to them by adapting to their changing perceptions and needs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

IC2: Stakeholder Requirement Specification<\/strong>. The ability for all stakeholders, employers, workers, regulators, platforms, involved in the new job ecosystem to specify their requirements by providing declarative and high level tools to express their needs and expectations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

IC3: Social Processes<\/strong>. The third challenge addresses the development of appropriate interaction methodologies and support for the new kind of workplace. This includes social processes relating workers, requesters and platform managers like onboarding, socializing, recognition and training, as well as ways to communicate and delegate work between humans and machines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IC4: Platform Ecosystems and IC5: Computation Capabilities<\/strong>. FoW will require overhauling the design and engineering of online job platforms to enable the collection, storage, retrieval, analysis, and mining of a wide array of human data across different types of technology-driven work. A fair bit of engineering and testing will be needed to ensure the development of scalable and portable platforms and the integration of multi-stakeholder goals in efficient and effective ways. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

IC6: Benchmark and Metrics<\/strong>. Benchmarking and the development of appropriate metrics to measure computing capabilities as well as human aspects such as satisfaction, human capital advancement, and equity, is another intellectual opportunity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

IC7: Ethics<\/strong>. Ethical considerations should drive FoW design and architecture. Privacy, compensation mechanisms and fairness are the main ethical issues of FoW. Privacy refers to the security of the data describing individuals, access to data, how data are being used, and consent. Compensation refers to various mechanisms including insurance, training and bonus, and the possibility for workers to choose among them. Fairness implies the detection and reduction of discrimination in decisions, especially in job allocation through auditing processes and compliance to regulations. Transparency, accountability and explainability must be studied for an ethical FoW.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

FoW Architecture<\/strong> <\/h3>\n\n\n\n