Good Intentions, Bad Inventions: How Employees Judge Pervasive Technologies in the Workplace

TL;DR

This study investigates how employees evaluate pervasive workplace technologies, revealing that acceptance depends on existing support, non-interference, and respect for rights, emphasizing the importance of ethical considerations in design.

Contribution

It identifies key factors influencing employee judgments of workplace technologies and highlights the need to incorporate AI ethics into ubiquitous technology design.

Findings

Acceptance depends on existing support and non-interference.

Technologies are judged favorably if they do not infringe rights.

Ethical considerations are crucial for designing acceptable pervasive technologies.

Abstract

Pervasive technologies combined with powerful AI have been recently introduced to enhance work productivity. Yet, some of these technologies are judged to be invasive. To identify which ones, we should understand how employees tend to judge these technologies. We considered 16 technologies that track productivity, and conducted a study in which 131 crowd-workers judged these scenarios. We found that a technology was judged to be right depending on the following three aspects of increasing importance. That is, whether the technology: 1) was currently supported by existing tools; 2) did not interfere with work or was fit for purpose; and 3) did not cause any harm or did not infringe on any individual rights. Ubicomp research currently focuses on how to design better technologies by making them more accurate, or by increasingly blending them into the background. It might be time to design better ubiquitous technologies by unpacking AI ethics as well.