Question

“I’m a great believer in the power of technology to make work-life balance better for everybody in the profession. Especially for working women and the sandwich generation who shoulder the double burden of work and family care. We can clearly see the benefits of technologies such as automation and robotics today in reducing work and family care. We can clearly see the benefits of technologies such as automation and robotics today in reducing workloads and routine tasks, especially for those in the audit profession as well as in the finance function. Instead of pulling all-nighters at the office during audit season, we can now work on-site at the client’s office and thanks again to technology such as cloud computing and analytics, go home at a more reasonable hour. In addition, the internet of things such as audio books and e-learning make it easier to enhance knowledge and skills. This can help to recruit and retain more talented women, and men, in the accountancy profession. MIA has 175 staff in total, of whom 134 are women, out of these 175, 69 are managers or above of whom 74% are female. This proves that it is possible to demolish the proverbial glass ceiling!”

Discuss the potential ethical issues that can be deduced from the case and how to solve it?

Answer 1

Indeed, technologies like AI, automation, robotics etc. can be used for making a good work life-balance, automating the routine work, etc. but it has some grave limitations which pose a lot of ethical issues. Some of these ethical issues can be listed as follows-

· Can technology could be relied, dependent and trusted to take care of our family? There have been cases where robots have harmed the people. And there is another question about our responsibilities towards our family. Shouldn’t we be giving our time to them instead of purchasing robots to take care of them? These are very serious ethical questions which need to be pondered upon.

· Indeed we can use robotics and other automation technologies to do routine works but it will certainly lead to unemployment. A person who does a job earns money and takes care of his whole family but after the induction of automation to do these jobs he/she will lose the job and his/her entire family may have to duffer the brunt of this induction of robots to do his job. This also needs serious thought before taking any decision in this regard.

· The robotics, automation and AI will also create further socio-economic inequality in the society.

· Our relationship with other fellow being can also get affected by working with these robots and machines.

· There are times when AI and robots malfunctions and/or gets hacked then these machines can be used for violence or to destroy important documents. Then it will be a huge loss for the entire organization.

· AI, robots and automation also bring biases and prejudices at workplace. We also need to think about these issues.

So the given case study involves abovementioned ethical issues. We are living in a world where we cannot resist change and/or decline to accept technologies at workplace but we need to only allow those technologies which are safe, secure and have less disadvantages as compared to its negative repercussions on our lives. So we need to prudently tackle this issue.

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