OWe know how much artificial intelligence (AI) arouses fears, fantasies or promises, with significant repercussions on employment, but even more on the work and well-being of employees.
The design and implementation choices of these emerging technologies in organizations too often respond to a “technosolutionist” logic, which is part of a deterministic and performative paradigm. In other words, AI is not considered as “one” possible solution among others, but is posed from the outset as “the” solution to all the organization’s problems. It should generate, by its mere presence, gains in productivity (notably intellectual), greater creativity and subjective commitment, and make work more attractive through a sort of re-enchantment of the professional world.
The social imagination associated with generative AI is also based on the idea that it would reduce the cognitive cost of work, by taking over the most repetitive and boring tasks to allow the individual to reinvest in tasks. practices with higher added value. However, these tasks, which the organization perceives as futile, can represent an interest for the employee: either because they give him the opportunity to rest mentally (by operating in automatic mode), to imagine and innovate ( by intellectual wandering), or even having the impression of progressing in one’s work (in an activity that is generally hampered).
Furthermore, we see that these technologies can also be used as a “Trojan horse” to justify changes (organizational or professional) that are more acceptable when instilled by these tools than when they come from humans. Thus, selection at university has been made possible by algorithmic platforms (Parcoursup, My master), even though this has always been a highly flammable subject…
Managerial ideology
As research in the human and social sciences has demonstrated each time it has had to work to support digital transformations, design approaches regularly forget to involve end users, who are nevertheless the first recipients of these tools. The reality of their work is never taken into account, and the conditions for integrating these devices into always complex systems are not the subject of any consultation.
Various reasons explain this indolence. First, professionals are too often perceived as the adjustment variable or, worse, as the docile executors of an AI which becomes the master of those it was supposed to serve, in a sort of submission to authority. technical. Then, these tools are thought of as the armed arm of the organizational project or managerial ideology by which firms ensure that procedures and standards are well applied, particularly in new hybrid work contexts where activity is becomes invisible and individualized. This very top-down approach to the technological project can be summed up by this formula from the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair: “Science discovers, industry applies and man follows. »
You have 43% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.