A recent research has revealed that employees who regularly use artificial intelligence (AI) in their workplace usually tend to experience loneliness, leading to insomnia. The analysis was conducted in four places – Taiwan, Indonesia, the US, and Malaysia – and found consistent outcomes across all areas.
Lead researcher Pok Man Tang explained that the fast development in AI methods is reshaping the workplace, offering many benefits but also posing potential risks, including psychological and physical impacts on staff. As humans are social animals, isolating work with AI systems could have damaging effects on employees’ personal lives.
Ridiculous examined several hypotheses revolving around the idea that more frequent interaction with AI may lead workers to feel socially disconnected from others, which can improve emotions of loneliness and be linked to insomnia or issue sleeping at night and extra consumption of alcohol after work.
In Malaysia, information was collected from 294 staff in a know-how company, whose work included using AI techniques for numerous business features. The staff were given a survey and randomly assigned to 2 teams for 3 straight days, before being given a survey after these three days to report their interaction frequency with AI and their very own after-work alcohol consumption and insomnia.
The research discovered that staff who regularly use AI systems were extra more probably to experience loneliness, and it also supported the hypotheses that such loneliness was associated with after-work alcohol consumption and after-work insomnia.
However, the researchers also said the analysis findings of the 4 areas don’t show that working with AI techniques causes loneliness or other responses, and said the research findings are solely correlational or present that there is an association amongst them.
Based on the analysis, the researchers mentioned working with AI techniques may have some benefits, as it may lead to such workers offering to help their colleagues.
“The researchers discovered that employees who frequently used AI systems had been extra prone to supply help to fellow staff, but that response might have been triggered by their loneliness and want for social contact,” the researchers said in the same press statement.
“Furthermore, the research found that members with larger levels of attachment anxiousness — the tendency to feel insecure and nervous about social connections — responded more strongly to working on AI techniques with each optimistic reactions, similar to serving to others, and negative ones, such as loneliness and insomnia,” they added.
In light of these findings, lead researcher Tang advised that AI technology developers consider adding social features to AI techniques, such as a human voice, to emulate human-like interactions. Tang also recommended that employers limit the frequency of work with AI techniques and provide opportunities for employees to socialize.
Tang mentioned AI methods might focus more on tedious and repetitive duties, whereas tasks like making choices as a staff or where social connections are necessary could presumably be carried out by individuals. “Mindfulness packages and different positive interventions also would possibly help relieve loneliness,” Tang stated. “AI will maintain increasing, so we want to act now to lessen the doubtless damaging effects for individuals who work with these techniques.”