The Koppers Building – Conference Room 2 – E. Graham – Lower Level
436 Seventh Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15219
Abigail Green will join a panel discussing how artificial intelligence could change the workplace. Our awareness of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) programs recently exploded onto the scene. Its rise was not only unexpected but foreshadows long-term implications for society in general and individuals in particular.
Elon Musk has been quoted as warning that AI may even be the end of civilization. But is it really something to be feared or a godsend? In the past few months, its potential to help with routine, mundane, and even creative writing-related tasks has been proven. It’s already being used to research and write homework assignments, college admission essays, and scholarly articles, conduct legal research (more on that later), draft PowerPoint presentations, summarize books and articles, and run calculations, to name just a few of its uses.
The crescendo for this technological tsunami is surging, and we are at just the beginning of an upheaval in the years to come that will ripple through the labor market and global economy. Only now are we just starting to realize its transformative and far-reaching impact on the workplace. On a positive note, it’s already changing hiring as we know it, allowing some even to hold more than one full-time job at a time and freeing employees from many mundane aspects of their jobs. However, there are risks, too. A March 2023 report by Goldman Sachs projected that 300 million jobs around the world could be disrupted by AI, and the global consulting firm McKinsey estimated that in the next seven years alone, AI would cause at least 12 million Americans to change to another field of work by 2030.
Given the speed and degree of change that’s anticipated, this program is designed to help labor and employment attorneys, professional neutrals, organized labor, HR professionals, and those holding management positions to get up to speed by helping them “know what they don’t know.”
Because AI is such an impactful and important topic, please note that our program will run for 90 minutes instead of the usual 60 to allow for more questions. Here are some of the topics to be addressed:
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An overview of AI – what it is, how it works, and it’s strengths and weaknesses.
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How can we expect AI to impact the union organizing process?
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What workplace disciplinary and grievance issues can we anticipate?
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How will AI impact the practice of law? Union representation? Management? The arbitration process?
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How will the expansion of AI be expected to impact the HR profession?
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What are some of the short-term, intermediate, and long-term changes in the workplace that we can expect AI to?
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What are some of the legal issues that will arise as employees come to rely on AI to complete many of their assigned tasks?
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Should employers have a workplace AI policy, and if so, what should it cover?
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What are the workplace implications when coworkers differ about the wisdom of forming a union?