Center for the Futures of Work, Information and Technology

The Center for the Futures of Work, Information and Technology promotes research on the interlinked transformation of work and dynamics of emerging technologies, and to translate research findings to inform practice, pedagogy and policy.

In 2018 the NSF identified the “Future of Work at the Human Technology Frontier” as one of its 10 “big ideas.” The objective of that effort is to encourage interdisciplinary research to understand how “constantly evolving technologies are actively shaping the lives of workers and how people in turn can shape those technologies.” In so doing, it aims to use those findings “to increase opportunities for workers and productivity for the American economy.”

Technology is a central focus, as its use enables and empowers certain types of work, displaces others and creates new kinds of work that were not previously possible. Information and communications technologies (ICTs) in particular have facilitated the development of new ways of working. ICTs have dramatically reduced transaction costs, making it possible to sell goods and services used and new to an entire nation and the world. ICT-enabled platforms opened the doors for contingent work that can be done by anyone with access to the Internet and some tools, providing flexibility at the cost of a lack of predictability and the protections of established modes of employment. These and other developments call out for research to document the current landscape of work and technology, to understand how work is changing and determine how best to deploy emerging technologies in order to inform policy and education.

The center provides a focal point to rally faculty across the school to advance research on the changing nature of work and to incorporate insights into new educational and outreach activities. The center provides a connecting point to industry, employers and alums and a space for researchers to share their research and turn it into value for students, employers and the broader community.

Talks

Monsters of Our Own Creation: AI, Occupational Solidarity, and the Soul of the Future of Work

Kevin Lee

NEW DATE AND TIME: Thursday 24 April 2025, 12–1pm, Hinds 347

Abstract: My paper addresses how we have navigated the advance of AI technologies across today’s economies and societies. In particular, it addresses a puzzle I encountered with regard to how we have navigated the notion of our humanness, and what we more broadly value enough to take with us versus leave behind, in this era of change. This puzzle came up as I was using ethnographic and interview methods to examine work seen as distinctively human – namely, artistic expression, in the form of music composition – and the occupational community behind it. While scholarship on occupational communities has tended to expect that members might push against threats like technological rationalization and protect the human beings of the community from being automated away, I discovered that members might instead spearhead such technological rationalization, in ways that threaten to automate away the community. The music composers at the heart of my study specifically used their experience with and understanding of the work of music composition to build an AI that composes music. And though they intended for the AI to be used by and even collaborate with other composers across the community, the AI ended up being used in video content production, to compete with and automate away the community. They, in turn, made sense of this situation by drawing on definitions of worth native to the community. Specifically, they drew on the fact that composers did not see the work that was being automated away as very human, in that it was not infused with much of what they called the composer’s soul. As such, the work, as well as those who did it, were not seen as worthy enough to protect, paving the way for them to be automated away.

Dr. Kevin W. Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Organizational Behaviour and Human Resources Division at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business. He earned his BA from Columbia University and his MPhil and PhD from New York University. His research concerns the future of work and organizing. He has looked closely at how the push toward the future, as embodied in situations like the advance of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, has collided with existing work and organizational arrangements.

Center Projects

The Future of News Work: Human-Technology Collaboration for Journalistic Research and Narrative Discovery

This project explores the future co-evolution of news work and computational tools. Journalists and news work are important to study because, even in the face of numerous challenges, news organizations remain a powerful force for keeping communities safe and healthy by providing information about events and trends to help people make better decisions about their lives. Journalism, as an information-based industry and profession, has always been impacted by new technologies, most recently by the rise of the Internet and loss of advertising revenue, as well as the long-standing tension between journalistic values and business interests. These pressures take a toll on journalistic processes and products. Some important stories are not getting told: they take too much time to discover, research, and craft into narratives, and time is increasingly in short supply. The project seeks to address these problems through a combination of fieldwork and user-centered development of interactive tools for supporting journalists in research and narrative discovery, i.e., finding the story that the data tell and interesting and relevant ways to convey that story to a reader.

This project will advance knowledge about technology and news work through field studies and user-centered development of interactive tools for supporting journalists in research and narrative discovery. The resulting technology-supported work processes will be evaluated in experiments with freelance journalists and through deployment in newsrooms. The proposed project is composed of several interwoven components, each with a specific focus, yet designed to be mutually supportive and to lead to research convergence: (1) focus on better understanding workers, their work and especially their current relationship to technology in newsrooms; (2) build and assess ways to support journalistic research, specifically finding relevant information in large document collections of different kinds, using deep learning techniques for entity extraction and coreference resolution (AllenNLP), semantic search (BERT) and common sense reasoning (COMET); and (3) build and assess ways to support narrative discovery. Resulting tools will be evaluated in field experiments and through their impacts on work examined in field studies. Both sets of tools will later be augmented by adding the ability to work on audio data. Assessment will be extended to consider alternative ways to divide tasks between human journalists and the computational tools. Running throughout the project will be work on evaluation, synthesis, dissemination of findings and tools, planning and project management.

The project is supported by an NSF grant, “The Future of News Work: Human-Technology Collaboration of Journalistic Research and Narrative Discovery”, 21-29047 (Syracuse), 21-28906 (Stevens) and 21-29020 (Columbia). The PIs are Kevin Crowston & Keren Henderson (Syracuse), Jeffrey Nickerson (Stevens) and Lydia Chilton and Mark Hansen (Columbia).

The Work in the Age of Intelligent Machines Research Coordination Network

The Work in the Age of Intelligent Machines (WAIM) Research Coordination Network (RCN) (https://waim.network/) brings together researchers working to develop the understanding needed to jointly design both sides of the human-technology frontier in work settings where people interact with intelligent machines.

Highlighted Publications

Artificial intelligence in information systems: State of the art and research roadmap (PDF)

Ågerfalk, P. J., Conboy, K., Crowston, K., Jarvenpaa, S. L., Lundström, J. Eriksson, Mikalef, P., & Ram, S.. (In Press). Artificial intelligence in information systems: State of the art and research roadmap. Communications Of The Association For Information Systems (Cais).

Communicating with the masses from isolation: What happened when local television journalists worked from home (PDF)

Henderson, K., Raheja, R., & Crowston, K.. (2022). Communicating with the masses from isolation: What happened when local television journalists worked from home. In Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences. Presented at the Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences, Virtual due to COVID.

Impacts of the Use of Machine Learning on Work Design (PDF)

Crowston, K., & Bolici, F.. (2020). Impacts of the Use of Machine Learning on Work Design. In 8th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction. https://doi.org/10.1145/3406499.3415070

The Genie in the Bottle: Different Stakeholders, Different Interpretations of Machine Learning (PDF)

Harandi, M., Crowston, K., Jackson, C., & Østerlund, C.. (2020). The Genie in the Bottle: Different Stakeholders, Different Interpretations of Machine Learning. In Hawai’i International Conference on System Science. https://doi.org/10.24251/HICSS.2020.719

Impacts of machine learning on work (PDF)

Crowston, K., & Bolici, F.. (2019). Impacts of machine learning on work. In Proceedings of the 52nd Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-52). https://doi.org/10.24251/HICSS.2019.719