The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training will inquire into and report on the rapid development and uptake of automated decision-making and machine learning techniques in the workplace. This submission takes a bigger picture perspective of technological change within organisations that rises above these current concerns. Such a perspective importantly highlights repeated patterns, and longer trajectories. This wider perspective helps to temper and revise some of the perspectives driven by hype and reactive responses. Thus, this responses to the Terms of Reference above are more of this wider perspective. Importantly, there is no reason to think that the trajectories and past experiences will change in the future. People who say, ‘but (Generative) AI is vastly different to previous technologies’ fails to appreciate that this is precisely what was said about previous technologies.

The submission argues that digital technologies are not simply inserted ‘as is’ into organisations. Technology is enacted within a pre-existing workplace environment that includes long-standing organisational processes and practices, and information infrastructures. These organisational realities mould the form digital technologies take within a specific organisation and how they are used. The enacted technologies in turn then shape organisational realities, including the nature of work and how the organisation’s customers experience the organisation. These organisational, and wider social, economic and political, contexts and values shape how technologies are designed and deployed. This means that the technical capability of digital technologies does can determine how it is used. 

While contemporary forms of ADM and machine learning (a.k.a. AI) provide new functionalities and open up new modes of operation, much can still be learned from previous digital transformations with older digital technologies. Indeed, often it is innovative uses of older technologies, rather than novel technologies, that brings more significant and substantial organisational outcomes. Indeed, in many cases it is not the technology per se that matters most, but how it is used.