Artificial Intelligence May Lead to ‘Social Loafing’ at Work: How Robots Affect Workplaces | louder.news

Anything you can do, a robot could do, and it could make people lazier.

The corporate phenomenon known as “social loafing”—when one colleague doesn’t work as hard because others will pick up the slack—occurs more often in groups of humans, whether in the office or on a school project. But as robotics has slowly been integrated into the workplace, researchers investigated its prevalence between humans and automated technology, finding that humans exerted less effort when they could rely on robots to complete their tasks in a group

“Teamwork is a mixed blessing,” study author Dietlind Helene Cymek said in a statement. “Working together can motivate people to perform well, but it can also lead to a loss of motivation because the individual contribution is not as visible.” The study, published Wednesday in Frontiers in Robotics and AI, tested the productivity of 42 participants, who were asked to rate their effort and performance after the experiment by looking at a circuit board for errors during 90 minutes

Half of the participants were told that their tables had already been inspected by Panda, a robot, but that they were not working directly with the machine. Although the time spent inspecting the boards did not differ between the two observed groups, participants working with Panda detected fewer errors and appeared to “look for defects less carefully than participants working alone.”