Month / September 2019

by Nicolle

The big, disturbing AI experiment in the classroom

“These classrooms are laboratories for future generations… just how this all works out won’t be apparent until they become adult citizens.”

China’s capacity to implement and integrate new AI technology into their society never fails to shock me. The video below on all the ways China is using AI in the classroom is no different.

Watching it reminded me of a term I just learned, parental anxiety management. The term comes from the article, The Case Against Spying on Your Kids With Apps, which does an excellent job of showing off the creepy ways parents can track their kids alongside reasons why they shouldn’t. The takeaway is that surveillance tech markets themselves as the solution to parents’ collective anxiety about their kids safety and health.

While China’s government certainly plays a massive role in the expansion of AI, the cultural acceptance of new technology that supposedly benefits our kids isn’t limited to China. Watch the Chinese parents share why they think it’s a good idea to use artificial intelligence in the classroom, and you’ll see little difference between those parents and US parents who just want what’s best for their kids.

I can only hope that our government steps up and puts huge limits on AI in the classroom so our kids don’t end up monitored, tracked, and shamed as they go through the education system.

by Nicolle

I wrote a career change book thanks to #NaNoWriMo

Last year I participated in National Novel Writing Month (#NaNoWriMo) to kickstart the process of writing a nonfiction book. In November 2018, I wrote just over 35,000 words!

Fast forward 11 months and I just got the final cover for my book that helps career changers navigate the #futureofwork.

Career change book
A new book for career changers and the future of work with a bit of a twist

While NaNoWriMo is geared towards fiction writers, I found the community, tips, and single focus on writing for volume super helpful to beat procrastination and make writing a priority.

But here’s the fun part: my nonfiction career change book has a touch of fiction in it. I put a dystopian choose your own adventure type story in it.

Putting a fictional interactive story in a nonfiction career change book isn’t traditional. But the #futureofwork isn’t traditional. And in truth some of the things happening in the workplace look quite dystopian.

I aim to help workers navigate it all. So this isn’t your average career change book. The word of work has changed and so too should the career advice.

Curious? Join my virtual book release party.

And if you’re thinking of writing your own book, check out NaNoWriMo:

And see how to get started writing your first draft.
https://lnkd.in/gU9Askk

by Nicolle

This call is being monitored (and used to discipline call center workers)

The premise of using affect as a job-performance metric would be problematic enough if the process were accurate. But the machinic systems that claim to objectively analyze emotion rely on data sets rife with systemic prejudice, which affects search engine results, law enforcement profiling, and hiring, among many other areas. For vocal tone analysis systems, the biased data set is customers’ voices themselves. How pleasant or desirable a particular voice is found to be is influenced by listener prejudices; call-center agents perceived as nonwhite, women or feminine, queer or trans, or “non- American” are at an entrenched disadvantage, which the datafication process will only serve to reproduce while lending it a pretense of objectivity.

Recorded for Quality Assurance

All of us are used to hearing the familiar phrase “This call is being monitored for quality assurance” when we contact customer service.

Most of us don’t give a second thought to what happens to the recording after our problem is solved.

The article above takes us in the new world of call center work, where your voice is monitored, scored by AI, and used to discipline workers.

“Reps from companies claim their systems allow agents to be more empathetic, but in practice, they offer emotional surveillance suitable for disciplining workers and manipulating customers. Your awkward pauses, over-talking, and unnatural pace will be used against them.

The more I read about workplace surveillance, the more dystopian the future of work looks. Is this really what we want? Is this what managers and leadership want?

What if we used the voice analysis on leadership. Why aren’t we monitoring and analyzing how leadership speaks to their subordinates or peers in meetings? Grant it, I don’t think that’d actually produce a healthy work environment but it only seems like a fair deal for leadership who implement and use these algorithms in their organizations.

On a related note, there’s a collection of papers out from Data & Society that seek to “understand how automated, algorithmic, AI, or otherwise data-driven technologies are being integrated into organizational contexts and processes.” The collection, titled Algorithms on the shop floor: Data driven technologies in organizational contexts, shows off the range of contexts in which new technology is fundamentally reshaping our workforce.

With companies racing to implement automated platforms and AI technology in the workplace, we need so much more of this research.


by Nicolle

Workaholics, burnout and the false promise of following your passion

Everyone in my generation has been raised with the idea that all we needed to do was follow our passion and everything would work out just fine in our careers. Finding your passion is the ultimate end goal in the quest for a career (that and paying off student loans).

In all this talk of passion, nobody mentions burnout. Or the fact that jobs come is many different crappy, boring flavors.

If you’re nodding along to the sentence above, watch this video. You’ll appreciate the honesty about careers, and get a small does of history about how we as a society shifted from the notion that a job is a job, to the idea that a job is a career and it should be a calling!

It time for a new career narrative, one that’s more honest and aligns with our new world of work. In my book I write about how telling people to follow their passion is unhelpful. We’re not longer working life long careers. Our passions, interests, needs all shift over the course of a lifetime. So the idea that we will follow a single passion until our dying day is simply outdated. The advice keeps people stuck, especially career changers.

Instead, people need to follow their curiosity, exploring different jobs and paths that align with their needs and interests as they grow.