Navigating the Complexities of the Future of Work
By Rukhsora Satimboeva, International Law Student, Geneva Graduate Institute
My personal take on the Future of Work Summit 2024
Amidst breaches of peace in certain parts of the world and possible hindrances to peace with the rising AI and global migration, an iconic building bearing the name of and hope for peace – Maison de la Paix (from French ‘Home of Peace’) – of the Geneva Graduate Institute welcomed wide-ranging stakeholders – international public servants, private actors, academics, civil society members and students – to the Future of Work Summit on 20 June, 2024.
The Summit offered participants and discussion-steering experts the opportunity to collectively deliberate on possible – yet uncertain – futures of interlinkages in the labor market from a systems-thinking perspective. Each table received a systems-thinking map illustrating either the AI-Labour or Migration-Labor nexus, and was encouraged to discuss potential points of leverage and interventions into the either.
The intersectionalities between these AI-Labor and Migration-Labor nexuses also found their place in the last round of workshops of the Summit with the reshuffle of roundtable members interested in either nexus aiming to render the discussions more productive and diverse. Given the uncertainties of these issues, this event has served as a testament to the elevated complexity of actions to be taken regarding them, but at the same time brought hope for relevant silo-breaking dialogues and actions ahead.
Connecting with academic interests
As a current International Law (IL) student at IHEID, I have cultivated interests in AI, in critical approaches to IL through its inequity-enabling role in the ‘development’ or ‘neo-colonial’ capitalist projects towards the Global South and in alternative or well-being economies. Therefore, the main themes of AI and migration, diverse professional backgrounds of its participants and the potential to foster multi-perspective conversations and collective thinking had motivated me to participate in the day-long Future of Work Summit 2024, wherein equity took the center-stage of our ‘teams’ roundtable discussions.
It was a fruitful opportunity to partake in three thought-provoking workshops along with our team, aspirationally and ironically named ‘Equitable Equity’. Engaging in meaningful conversations with practitioners and thinkers from the wide-ranging spheres – International Organizations such as the ITC, ILO, UNRISD, NGOs or non-profit initiatives such as Startups Without Borders and RemoteCoders, foreign public service professionals from the Swiss and Canadian Missions to the UN, a think tank, an NGO consulting firm and many more – served as an example of wide-ranging opportunities for collaboration and career trajectories overlapping with my areas of interests.
Defining multistakeholder interventions
The main discussions in our team revolved around potential interventions in the AI-Labour nexus - their goal, actors to be involved, certain activities to conduct, and uncertainties to consider. A challenging but interesting big chunk of our discussions ended up in the goal and complex uncertainty of AI-Labor causality/correlation links and their externalities.
Through active listening, perspective-sharing and systems-thinking methods, our team could finally agree to set responsible equity as our goal, and a regulation to design AI inclusively, with bias-sensitivity and equitable operationalization as the main need. For instance, one of my contributions from a transnational law perspective to the discussions on regulation options was the example of the EU’s AI Act - with its pros and plenty of norm-setting cons, which may impose Euro-centric norms on the rest of the globe. In my view, regulators and practitioners should refer to the AI Act as a point of reference for future regulations elsewhere, only by taking into account each country’s/entity’s specificities as well as needs for and culture of regulation. Additionally, due to a mostly Geneva-based participants, it was also challenging for our team to account for sufficiently-inclusive perspectives/suggestions. Thus, perhaps, future initiatives and events to discuss AI-Labor and/or Migration-Labor nexus would need a more inclusive and broader range of participants, including but not limited to a wider geographic and national representation.
The Summit provided a platform for discussing potential solutions for future-building with labor-empowering and labor-enriching AI technology. Personally, it was quite exhilarating to be part of this thought-provoking event, and I aspire to carry all the learnings obtained from it and valuable connections built through it to my future studies and work on IL and its connection with equity, AI and labor.