Our guest today is Samuel Engblom. Thank you Samuel for taking the time to join us on this course. My first question to you has to do with the organization of work. How do AI and algorithms change how companies organize their work? What we know from history is that technological developments are one of the key drivers of change in the labor market. Technological developments affect the number of jobs in different sectors and occupations. It affects the content of jobs and it affects the organization of work. If we go back some years, a lot of the discussion about the effect of digitalization, including AI on the labor market was about what percentage of jobs would disappear because now they would be technologically possible to automate, also of course, what new jobs would appear and the skills needed for you to do those jobs. There was also discussion about the distributional effects that who will gain and who will lose from these changes in the labor market. Then that debate moved on to a more concern itself with how AI and digitalization would affect the content of jobs. They said that maybe not that many jobs will actually disappear, but a lot of jobs will have their content changed. There I think the theory said that with the help of AI and algorithms and other digital tools, jobs will become more specialized. Human beings would be able to focus on the things that human beings do the best while algorithms and other kinds of digital technologies would do the routine tasks, the task that will be possible to automate. That would lead to more specialization. What we have seen in the labor market, however, is also the inverse of this. We have seen an increased diversification of tasks as technologies make things that earlier required a specialist's skills easier for people with less of specialist knowledge to perform. These workers can also have their tasks diversified. One example, it would be journalists. Earlier to make a story in the newspaper, you would have one person who would do the interviews and write story, you would have a photographer who would take the pictures. There would be a person doing the layout so this could be published through the printing press. Now, it's very often the same person who is supposed to write the story, take the photographs, maybe make a short film that was put on and published by the same journalist on the Website of the Newspaper. That would be an example of how technology actually makes tasks more diversified and the work is less specialized. Then we have effects on the organization of work. Here, on the one hand, we can see how Information technology and Communication technology facilitate or should facilitate the coordination of people who are inside and outside of the physical and legal bounds of the firm. A firm could more easily communicate and cooperate with the people that are in another part of the world or who are out in the countryside and not in the city. They could also easier coordinate their work with, for example, self-employed workers or the employees of a different company. That should be one effect that we would see of this increased use of Information and Communications technology in the workplace. On the other hand, we can also see that there are forces, and especially when we look at the effects of AI and machine learning on the world of work, that would favor larger units. We can see that some markets that have emerged and that are very much run by algorithms, we can think about Facebook, Twitter, and these big companies, Google, Amazon, where the fact that data has become important, makes it easier for certain companies to dominate the market. The advantage that you have from being big becomes even larger. This, of course, would move the organization to work in a different direction into larger corporations. Then of course, they might organize their work with the help of smaller combination. The organization of work can be affected in different ways by the introduction of AI and the use of algorithms in it and the world of work. If we then look closer on how algorithms are used in workplace, we can see that the abilities of algorithms to process large amounts of data to make predictions for the future and rank different alternatives can find a number of users. One set of users are in human resources management. Algorithms are used in recruitment. They are used to plan and manage work. They are also used in the monitor and control and evaluation of performance. Starting with recruitment, we can see that algorithms can be used by companies that receive a lot of applications. For example, to make a first screening of applicants define the ones that are the most interesting for the company. If we go back some years, though I think there was also the idea that algorithms were less biased than human beings and that this could actually be a way of reducing discrimination in working life. Now, then, when we have some experience in this use of algorithms in recruitment. And I think the picture is a lot more mixed. There has been problems that algorithms are biased because the data that they were trained on are biased so they tend to repeat the mistakes of human beings instead of eliminating these mistakes. If you look at planning and management, this is actually where I think we've had maybe the biggest discussion about AI and algorithms in work. This is an example of the use of algorithms for planning and management would be some of the famous platform corporations. Uber, Fedora, Link, these delivery services and taxi services where the algorithm it will decide which route the driver will take, it will set the price for the journey. It will match a driver or a delivery person with a with a ride or a delivery that has to be made. This is something then that is done automatically by the algorithm. But there are other uses which in a sense I think are more important for the labor market because they affect bigger parts of the labor market. Then it's that we can using algorithms, for example, a retail company can make sure that they optimize their staffing by having people working the hours when there are a lot of customers and not other times of the day, they have the possibility to automatically call in more workers by sending out offers to people that sometimes work for them. You can also see this in health care, in care of the elderly, in hotels and restaurants where the use of different human resources management system actually very important for deciding what person will work when. Thereafter, we have a large use of these algorithms to organize work which are receive less attention than the more high profile cases of the platform companies. Finally, we have the monitoring, control and evaluation of performance. Here algorithms can be used to process the data that is generated within the organization in order to evaluate how well it performs, how well different parts of the organization performs, how well different individuals perform, and this of course, can be the basis for management decision on promotion, on pay, or on the reorganization of the workplace. But it's not just in human resources management that algorithms are used. Algorithms are often a key part of the computer systems used by companies and public agencies to run their operations. These can be systems that are used for the interaction with the clients and customers and citizens. This can be computer systems that help people make decisions by processing data and suggesting what decisions should be made. This makes these operational systems of the companies and the agency's an important part of the work environment, even though they are not directly involved in the human resources management. All right. Thank very much Samuel. Thank you so much.
