Can AI improve mental well-being at work?
A few days ago I received this survey from one of the HR organization.
The question was - Can technology play a role in Mental Health support at work place?
The current remote work trends is bringing in a lot of stress for employees. Specially the female employees who have children. Children education has also become home based, plus the work from home culture. It is not possible to ignore the other things at home, when you are at home. There is a lot of multitasking that needs to happen and that is draining out people in different ways, as I mentioned specially for parents with younger children, who would normally go to school but now are at home doing studies online.
Last month my sister and her family were down with Covid, so they were all home bound and my sister was asked to do work from home since her symptoms were very mild. But then all her house help was gone. Because of the Covid the cook stopped coming, the other regular house help stopped. No one wanted to come for a month. She has 2 children and my mother who is also 78, so she cannot expect her to do much at home. In such a case, she had to manage the house cleaning work , cooking, all the other chores. Her children were also home bound so they could not go for tuitions and taking up their studies also added up, plus she had to do work from home for the full 8 hours.
Practically it was not possible, she had no choice but to do it and eventually she fell sick and was hospitalized. The whole craziness got onto her. And this is just not one of a case, but a lot of working people are facing this issue. Side effects of Covid are bringing more harm to people which is just discounted everywhere.
Coming back to the survey. One of the point in the survey was;
Would employees prefer to talk to a robot over their manager about stress and anxiety in the workplace?
What do you think of this question people?
My first reaction to this was; how absurd. You talking to a lifeless robot; I would rather talk to my own-self looking in the mirror then talking to a programmed robot, who might just give me some coded responses.
This is where the world is leading to. A lot of people jobs are getting replaced with robots but then replacing at this level is unimaginable for me, which also to a large extent shows that human lives, human touch, emotions all have lost significance. And I am sure in the next few years this will be a growing trend and people will also follow it.
We will be more and more disconnected with real life and get onto living a virtual life with robots all around us and I do not see that day very far when humans themselves start functioning like robots.
Giant techies are so much in a race to outrun each other that they can come up with any absurd thing now. Where does all of this take us? Getting cut off from our consciousness more and more and becoming puppets is all that I can say.
To conclude, I put a question back to the surveyor again.
Are we becoming more Intelligent with the Technology or Dumber with it
