A groundbreaking study from the Institute for the Future of Work suggests that exposure to new workplace technologies, including trackers, robots, and AI-based software, adversely affects people's quality of life.
Analysing data from a survey of over 6,000 individuals, the think tank investigated the impact of four technology categories increasingly integrated into the economy.
Their findings indicate that higher exposure to technologies such as AI-based software, surveillance devices like wearable trackers, and robotics correlated with poorer health and wellbeing among workers.
By contrast, use of more long-established information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as laptops, tablets and instant messaging at work tended to have a more positive effect on wellbeing.
“We found that quality of life improved as the frequency of interaction with ICTs increased, whereas quality of life deteriorated as frequency of interaction with newer workplace technologies rose,” the report said.
While the authors did not directly investigate the causes, they pointed out that their findings were consistent with previous research which showed, “such technologies may exacerbate job insecurity, workload intensification, routinisation and loss of work meaningfulness, as well as disempowerment and loss of autonomy, all of which detract from overall employee wellbeing”.
