*ETUI-Aída Ponce Del Castillo 59 results

"The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence is unparalleled, establishing it as a ubiquitous element in workplaces and our daily lives. The era when AI was exclusively associated with robots and intricate algorithms for the technically proficient is over. This marks a significant paradigm shift, with profound implications and changes regarding the world we live in.

This book proposes an analysis of this transformation, and does so by bringing together the reflections of high-level academics and research activists from across the world. It adopts a multidisciplinary approach, incorporates a diversity of geographical and cultural points of view and focuses on the deep and often invisible implications of AI for the labour market and society as a whole. Thematically speaking, it addresses AI's legal, societal, global, environmental, technological and labour aspects.
The contributing authors show how contemporary AI is gradually reshaping society. They also highlight the need to understand the dynamics of technological convergence and remind us of the critical role played by humans, who remain present at every stage of AI's lifecycle and value chain. Prevention and precaution are portrayed as crucial components of the critical thinking approach we need to adopt towards AI.

The book also examines the power dynamics of technological evolution and governance, explores AI's relationship with the environment and tackles the crucial issue of AI's impact on the labour market, working conditions and labour standards. Its fundamental goal is to prompt readers to transcend the narrow disciplinary perspectives associated with the silos within which we tend to work, introducing a range of novel and diverse academic viewpoints on AI and its challenges."

"The multiple crises that the world is facing have diverse and unequal impacts on society at large. Uncertainty reigns as these crises continuously evolve in many different directions. The fast-paced change that we are experiencing challenges societal structures and triggers social unrest. Foresight and scenarios can be useful tools to improve our response to these crises from a long-term perspective. This report starts by explaining how foresight and future scenarios can help to anticipate how to best respond to crises, feed evidence-based policy-making and foster innovation. They can also help organisations of all types and sizes to take coherent and robust action. The report argues that strategic foresight needs to be implemented as a new layer of organisational change. The report then describes the ETUI future scenarios developed in 2020: (1) High-Tech Hives; (2)(Dis)-connected Ghettos; (3) Green Castles; and (4) Eco-Villages, explaining the foresight methodology used to develop them. In order to bring the scenarios up to date, the text maps some of the key events that took place in 2021 and 2022, focusing on the four global crises: climate and energy; rising inflation; war and changing geopolitical order; and social inequalities. To encourage people to use the ETUI scenarios, the report provides guiding questions to help the reader to recognise whether a given scenario is starting to materialise. It identifies key issues that need to be monitored in the coming years. Finally, the text highlights the fact that strategic foresight does not end with the development of future scenarios, and that a foresight process also requires action plans, including roadmaps and contingency plans. It concludes by inviting readers to use the scenarios in their own work environment."

"Policy recommendations
- • The draft Directive on improving working conditions in platform work (Platform Work Directive) clarifies the employment status and working conditions of platform workers. Importantly, it also focuses on regulating algorithmic management. While a step in the right direction, the chapter on algorithmic management fails to deliver the full benefits workers might have expected: by importing some GDPR rights only into the draft Platform Work Directive without fixing pre-existing shortcomings, the legislator has helped to foster an inconsistent regulatory environment that places workers in legal uncertainty and unable to exercise important rights.
• Fair and transparent algorithmic management should be guaranteed by strengthening workers' ability to fully exercise their rights of access to their data, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing and data portability.
• The final Platform Work Directive should set limits on algorithmic management: by default; automated decisions should be presumed to be fully automated, unless the digital platform demonstrates meaningful human intervention. Recent court cases have shown that platforms often falsely claim that algorithm-based decisions were made by a human or with human involvement.