This unit allows us to collaborate with another course on the department which is MA-CCC.
This unit asks us to speculate the future of work and our readings included sci-fi articles, which confused me at first and made no sense as to how this is relevant to the course but I still read and understood the text. The following morning during the orientation, the pieces started coming together and esp. after the lecture and tutorial, I understood that the readings were to understand the principles of speculation through sci-fi. I particularly liked the article about BLACK MIRROR by Sergio Uruena. https://andphilosophy.com/2019/12/16/enacting-reflection-through-sci-fi/
In our group, all of us come from an Asian background with experience in creative industries, and during our conversations in the tutorial, lot of topics revolved to the difference between Asian and Western work culture, and how the Asian work culture is a product of a result-based culture and society which prioritises and asks for more performance in order to stand out, and prioritising work is a sign of a “good” employee, whereas in the Western culture, work-life balance is prioritised. One of my team-mates brought up an interesting example from her experience stating that how in the same MNC, Asian counterparts worked longer hours than their Western counterparts in the exact same role, and this resonated with me, and the group, so we decided to pursue this topic. https://www.brightinternships.com/blog/east-vs-west-5-different-working-cultures
This topic led us to several discussions around class, western colonisation, privilege, access, caste system, result-based culture, etc.
During one of our reflective activities we were asked to come up with problems that seemed impossible to solve and coming from an Indian creative background, I shared my experience on how the caste system plays a major role in employment, education, and work roles in the creative industries.https://www.jstor.org/stable/40276549 The referenced article shows quantitative data done by the government to show the gap and discrimination in employment based on caste. This also seemed to resonate and intrigue the group, and it led us to study more on why there is a huge difference in the work culture, our research personally resonated with me, since I have been affected by the system.
Now, that we had decided on a topic to speculate upon, we had to choose an industry to speculate and research in, logic dictates we speculate in the creative industry since we already have a good understanding of the culture, but we were advised against and asked to try and go out of our comfort zone. I personally believe that going out of our comfort zone is where we learn and expand our skills.
I figured any industry with a difference in work culture would be tech, since I have observed the difference in culture with my relatives who work in tech abroad v/s India. I also noticed a difference in culture in the hospitality industry after I moved to London, since here everyone adheres to working hours. We also looked at surface-level differences in logistics, export-import, and warehousing, but reached the conclusion that there may not be much difference since the jobs are manual and hence require similar effort.
Circling back to ‘Asian v/s Western’ culture, in the tech industry, we quickly proceeded to do some background research on where the disparity lies and what we can focus on speculating. During our tutorial and reflection, I felt that our topic was too wide and we could probably narrow down the scenario to speculate, while brainstorming with our tutor, we reached a point where we seemed to draw a few common points between tech and hospitality, namely burn out, stress, privilege and access, rapid technologisation in the industry.
Looking a little deeper into each topic, I discovered burnout is an increasingly rising phenomenon among tech employees. This also reminded me of an article I came across, speculating how human bodies are going to change in the next thousand years.1. https://www.cio.com/article/657960/burnout-an-it-epidemic-in-the-making.html https://www.marca.com/en/lifestyle/2022/11/05/6366c061ca4741d11d8b4575.html#
The hospitality sector is known to be one of the most stressful sectors and post-covid the impacts are being much more spoken about, and brought to light, but how do we mix the two industries?https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/restaurant-employee-burnout/
On a surface level, most tech companies have canteens and post-covid, and in an attempt to return to office culture, tech companies are spending to intrigue employees into coming to offices and working there.https://www.wired.co.uk/article/return-to-work-office-cost
Post-COVID, hospitality in major cities has taken a toll due to the aforementioned lack of employees in various companies, and we noticed the two are inter-related but focusing on both industries would be a big task considering time restraints, so we chose to focus on hospitality in tech. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2023/04/10/the-real-reason-why-companies-are-desperately-pushing-for-people-to-return-to-the-office/
Now, another major concern in speculation with the hospitality industry is that technology, (here AI, robots, software, AR/VR) is slowly replacing many workers in the industry. For example, fast food chains have self-ordering and self-checkout kiosks, which reduces human jobs. Hotel chains have self-check-in kiosks, and also robots that can help you with housekeeping or general chores, this poses a problem in speculating a ‘Future of Work’, but this is currently the scenario we’re speculating, which would create an impact to think how the very technology we develop is potentially going to replace us, and is there anything we can do about it?
A tangent to tech replacing jobs and the concept of burn-out led me to a question, ‘How are human interactions going to be?’, and more interestingly, how it would affect the workplace. This question arises from a personal perspective of how technology has overwhelmed us, and the latest generation in the workplace a.k.a., Gen-Z who are facing challenges in navigating the work culture, esp. in terms of soft skills and communication, and speculating this would create an impact on how technology which was meant to bring us closer, is the one creating problems in communication and relationships, which led to me thinking about, ‘Is this the very technology that we develop drive us apart and we cease to become a society/civilization?’ The below-mentioned articles talks about the preference of Gen-Z to work from home and their lack of soft skills https://www.theforage.com/blog/basics/generation-z-statistics https://www.spiceworks.com/hr/future-work/articles/gen-z-graduates-prefer-remote-or-hybrid-work/ https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gen-z-lacking-soft-skills-181047079.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAANx4TjgnrzQ6Sa1_qjwzgeLFEWMURSJWtWKdFLSrvlSjuBhr9xgEHD-TaFe6D5qc7S5pyJ4XL-OeAZqVWPZkVPRgW81s-5N9PPTCDXAxlPSruy0bB9NZSEaEulIW1T-Rn9OeKZaXicHDWeLGmBds_4Bt-oe_6WPU10IzQBp8weov The below mentioned article talks about how technology is affecting inter-personal relationships https://www.medicinenet.com/can_technology_destroy_relationships/article.htm
The aforementioned concerns talk about how technology is rapidly replacing jobs, and how this is going to affect the workplace dynamics and hence our society at large. In this context, we’re treating the tech company as a society, and trying to see how new technologies affect the dynamics among employees (people), in a formal and informal setting, the interaction of employees with the hospitality employees, which roughly translates to social interaction in an informal setting, and in turn seeing how technology developed to make hospitality better is going to affect this scenario.
This led me to approach a friend of mine, Rishabh Kumar, co-founder of Angoor.ai, and an interaction designer and we had a little chat regarding the topic of how technology might replace jobs, and his take was that this might happen in a digital capacity, rather than in a robotic capacity, and the only limitation was the slow advancement in energy storage and referred me to look into the ‘Kardashev scale’ we also talked about how AI was a blessing and a curse for designers, since we’re both designers and that it sometimes helps the process and sometimes it does not and so it can’t be definitive that it may replace our positions. Anyway, when I asked him how he feels about the workplace dynamics with respect to technological advancement since he is in a managerial capacity, he pointed out that the speed in advancement between technology-culture-biology might be a way to look at it, and studying the data would be helpful, and so a lot of insight has been provided in one conversation, which I shared with the group and we’re going to look at multiple aspects.
In the past two weeks, I have dove head first into the unknown territory of work and technology and trying and speculate a future in this, although the process is pretty overwhelming, it is quite fun to walk in unknown territory and explore it with people who are interested, curious and willing to also step into unknown territory. Even though initially, we had an approach to contrast and compare cultures, I believe our process and critical thinking led us to the point we are at right now, and have set a direction for the scenario we’re speculating. Although working on something tech, AI-related, hospitality or even work is something I’m unaware it is interesting to see how the initial readings of sci-fi articles had helped me gain an understanding of principles of speculation and to me, it seems like we’re trying to write a science fiction story about a tech and hospitality workplace as close to reality as possible. All of my readings/ research has shown me that maybe technology is replacing jobs, and will hinder inter-personal relationships, and I think this blog is proof enough of the current scenario we’re speculating since I can just as easily do this as a presentation in front of a group of people, and it will appeal and connect to an audience, but is a blog (developed through technology) appealing and connecting?