Jean-Jacques Pluchart
The digital economy, and in particular Artificial Intelligence, are often presented as freeing the worker from the most alienating tasks in favor of more creative actions, but they are also perceived as being able to generate a loss of meaning of action, professional malaise and violence at work. In the context of an organization, violence can take many forms: verbal and physical, psychological and social, symbolic and structural, which differ according to multiple factors: the activity carried out, the work situation, gender, but also according to the systems implemented, as in the case of digital technologies covering automation and expert systems, the Internet and social networks, symbolic and generative AI applications. Violence can be exercised between the actors themselves (between colleagues, between superiors and subordinates) and/or between the latter and the stakeholders (customers, users, suppliers, etc.) of the company or the administration, but it can also be caused by a procedure or a system.
The most frequently cited form of violence against workers generated by AI is the fear of losing one’s job and thus being socially downgraded, or of having to adapt to a new job that is said to be “augmented” by AI. The future “robot-man” fears, in particular, being confronted with the ingratitude and loneliness of a job carried out remotely, alone in front of a screen, prey to the dysfunctions and “black boxes” of a system, and most often subjected to digital panoptism. They fear losing the meaning of their work, no longer recognizing their symbolic order, no longer knowing their professional identity. He fears being exposed to the stress and burnout of the ‘enslaved man’. This anxiety can be all the more depressive as he can no longer activate his defense systems (by denial, displacement, derision, sublimation…) against a “robot” whose grip is inevitable.
The violence of this new relationship to work is all the more implicit as it is marked by the uncertainty weighing on the date and conditions of the implementation of the new system thus perceived as a ‘black swan’. The threat is all the more latent as it covers a growing number of jobs, ranging from back office (administration) to middle office (production and control) and front office (customer relations, etc.). It now reaches managers and executives responsible for reorganizing a company or a service, arbitrating between often complex operating systems, ensuring their cyber security and training staff in new practices. They are thus exposed to new types of risks to the sustainability of their organizations and to the future of their own careers.
These incomplete observations show that the forms of violence at work generated by the accelerated development of AI can only be detected, analyzed and framed by HRM approaches using psychology and sociology, but also anthropology and psychoanalysis.