Collaborating with robots

What does further robotisation mean for our work, our education and our society? NSvP director Sonia Sjollema and professor of personnel psychology Marise Born are currently working on raising awareness on this issue. Filmmaker Maaike Broos made a short fiction film about future work based on ideas of young people, and thereby shows how a robot is helpful and helpful to a patient.

What is a robot? Let’s start with that. Professor Marise Born explains: “Literally, the term robot denotes a ‘work slave’. When talking artificial intelligence, a robot simply denotes an algorithm or a formula. There could be something physical around it – like a self-steering vacuum cleaner or a humanoid body. Or it is a formula, often based on a large collection of data, the so-called ‘big data’. An algorithm can also be described as a formula that uses a collection of input data to predict outcome measures in the best possible way, without controlling the outcome. Then an optimal prediction of that outcome is possible, for example to what extent a person is able to live independently”. Born has collected an impressive number of examples of robots on her computer, such as a robot dog that detects roadside bombs and gastrobot Pepper that guides patients’ visitors to the right hospital ward and responds to their state of mind. The Telenoid allows people to talk at a distance from one another, while the robot reflects on the emotions of the other. With some robots Born would like to ‘look under the bonnet’ and gain an insight into how this came about and what the formula really entails. “Because,” she says, “people have sometimes come up with certain algorithms that are based on certain outcome measures. For example, to make more money.”

It is important that young people realise that they themselves can influence the future.

Influence on life

NSvP Director Sonia Sjollema drawns a picture of the current state of affairs in the field of work and robotisation. “Today’s technological revolution has the potential to take-over work from humans in the coming decades. Artificial intelligence affects our lives more directly than the previous technological revolutions has. Research at Oxford University has shown that 47 percent of jobs in America are at risk of being replaced by technological developments over the next 30 years”. As such, the impact of the research was great. Technology can now also take over non-routine work, which can have a big impact on jobs in the middle and upper segment. In the healthcare sector, for example, trainee surgeons learn how to operate a robot that performs operations for which the human hand is insufficient. However, it is not easy to predict whether the technology will actually take over tasks and at what pace, since this will depend on many factors. New technology creates new opportunities. The World Economic Forum predicts that 65 percent of the now six-year-old children will work in occupations which we do not know its existence of. Sjollema: “The young people of today still have a long working life ahead of them and have to realize that a lot is changing in the field of work. They can prepare for this by learning new skills, such as dealing with uncertainty. It is important that they realize that they themselves can influence the future.”

How do we make a social and democratic society in which everyone remains involved? The goal is for people to retain their valuable work and for us to continue to influence our work.

Keeping work worthwhile

Sjollema is clear about what young people need to learn: “Our education system must focus on further development of creativity and innovative thinking in order for future generations to be able to combat the major social and ecological concerns that are ahead of us. In addition to acquiring knowledge, we must be able to add something to what robots do not have the ability to do. For all professional sectors, the question of what technology can mean in a positive way applies. Furthermore, ethical considerations have to be taken into account: what makes us typically human, what determines the quality of our relationships and what makes our lives meaningful? Everyone needs basic knowledge of technology, but other disciplines remain important for the quality of work processes, but also for solving social problems that technology can create. How do we want to create the future society? People have to keep deciding that, and we thus cannot leave that to robots. The most important question now is: how do we make a social and democratic society in which everyone remains involved? The goal is for people to retain valuable work and for us to continue to influence work, and it is thus important for young people to become aware of their future filled with further automation and robots taking over their work. The NSvP therefore organised a filmchallenge to challenge young people to think about what their work will look like in the future”.

Existing themes

The aim of the filmchallenge was to challenge young people to imagine their future. They wrote a story or designed a film set or tech-prop (a technical object). Filmmaker Maaike Broos made a short fiction film based on the three winning designs: “The medium of film helps to understand different worlds. My film does not show what the world will look like in 2045, but it does raise questions with regard to the question what we humans think is desirable. It concerns a patient who does not want to talk to a nurse, but who wants to talk to a robot. At the end of the film the nurse appears to have played a more important role than the patient initially thought”. How do young people imagine the future of work? Broos: “Young people embroider on existing themes. The entries dealt, for example, with disappearing differences between men and women, robots that control people’s health, a different form of coffee at work and self-programmable environments”.

Technology is not good or bad, it is how we as human beings want to design and use that technology.

More than technology

Broos is also a corporate anthropologist. She believes: “It is important that various disciplines such as technicians, anthropologists, psychologists or economists cooperate more in the development of technology and that they involve people who will work with it in the design phase. Software needs input. As such, technians might have a lot of technical knowledge, but not always knowledge of the practice or the field for which they develop that technology”. An example: without teachers’ knowledge of pupils’ learning-styles you cannot develop an effective teaching robot that can actually teach the pupil something. Technology is not good or bad, but it is how we as human beings want to design and use that technology. This starts in education by making pupils think critically and consciously about the role of technology in their lives and work from an early age onwards.

A scare of man, as long as the robot has existed, is the existance of an autonomous robot who determines what he does. Professor Born gives examples: “There is now a robot who plays the game GO better than the best of all humans. Since the game has infinite possibilities and because it has to be played intuitively, this is quite remarkable. Intuition is a human trait of which artificial intelligence can now apparently win by studying millions of GO games that humans have played. For six months now, artificial intelligence has been able to teach itself this game.”

There are also robots that talk to each other in a kind of language that humans do not follow very well. The now deceased Stephen Hawking warned us about potential wrong purposes of technology, such as drones fighting each other and even provoking wars. Work is now also underway on ‘workplace emotion monitoring’. Born explains: “A robot is in an office garden and feels the atmosphere among people. The robot catches emotions of individuals surrounding it, as it were, and sends that information to its boss. This allows the company to influence job satisfaction and productivity. I find that very scary. Emotion recognition can be a major privacy violation even if the data is transmitted anonymously”.

Collaborating with robots

What psychological effects should we take into account when working with robots? Born: “The International Journal of Social Robotics has a lot to say about this. For example, it turns out that performance-oriented and perfectionist people like a robot to give them a hand when they think they should keep working while they are sick. Whilst looking at different persobalities, one can see differences in how people think about working with robots. Suppose you have to put a product together. French researchers concluded that extroverted people work more smoothly with a robot than introverted individuals or people with anxiety. As a selection-psychologist, I would immediately ask myself whether it would be wise to only hire extroverted people when the organisation is further robotised. Ethically, of course, you cannot. So the robot has to adapt to humans, so that they can enjoy working together and so that humans can make better use of their strengths”.

When a robot can stimulate and increase the self-esteem, autonomy and meaningfulness of individuals at work, they will likely remain happy.

Human Robot

According to research, the appearance of a robot also plays a role. Research has shown that if a robot looks like a device or, on the contrary, like a human being, it is allowed to carry out certain tasks. However, when the robot has a combination of human and technical characteristics, people often find it less suitable for this purpose. Incidentally, people assign more responsibility to human robots than to robots that look like a device, while technically there is no difference between them. This is called anthropomorphism: we attribute human characteristics to robots. We have been wondering for years whether it would be a good thing for robots to take over our work, because what would humans do? Marise Born: “Work constitutes a source of meaning for us. It is an expression of our identity. When a robot can stimulate and increase the self-esteem, autonomy and meaningfulness of individuals at work, they will remain happy. I would find it very interesting to investigate how we can robotize for the benefit of human development, so that we can preserve human values in our society”.

Conclusion

NSvP director Sjollema concludes: “Companies that are successful in new technology and digital platforms are getting more and more money and continue to compete on efficiency. The government follows the business community, but can also serve a regulatory purpose. Untill now, innovations have been used in existing systems in order to work even more efficiently and in a more cost-efficient manner. The NSvP supports organisations that have human development as their objective. Robotisation is about society as a whole. It is very important that young people realise that their world of work will change significantly and that the government realises that education needs to be organised differently”. If it would be up to Sjollema and Born, we would design a society with human values and have control over robots. In addition to the servant-leadership of mankind, something like ‘servant-roboticship’ would arise.