Latest news with #AlexiaCambon
Metro
27-05-2025
- Health
- Metro
People aren't ready to let robots and AI decide on euthanisia, study finds
You'd probably let AI compose an email for you. Going over a medical scan to check for signs of cancer? Most likely, yes as well. But deciding when life support should be switched off for a patient in a coma? A new study has shown there's one clear line where we don't yet want a robot to take control, and that is deciding on the time of death. This may not be entirely surprising, given most would hope for humanity at the end of life. And so far, there are no healthcare providers which do allow AI to decide on when to switch off life support. But as both artificial intelligence and assisted dying are set to become more and more of a part of global healthcare systems, it's a question that is set to become more relevant – so researchers have looked at our attitudes towards such a prospect. An international study led by the University of Turku reveals that people are significantly less likely to accept euthanasia decisions made by artificial intelligence (AI) or robots compared to those made by human doctors. Participants in Finland, Czechia, and the UK were told about scenarios where patients were in end-of-life care, often in a coma. Even when decisions about ending life support were exactly the same, they were accepted less if made by AI than by humans. In other words, how we feel about a decision is not only about whether it was the right or wrong call, but who made it and how. Researchers called this phenomenon the 'Human-Robot Moral Judgment Asymmetry Effect', saying we hold robots to a higher moral standard. However, if the decision was to keep life-support switched on, or if patients could request assisted death themselves, there was no judgement asymmetry between the decisions made by humans and AI. The findings echo similar conclusions by AI experts, who say humans are not yet at a point to accept giving AI responsibility for serious decisions about our lives. A survey of the future of AI in the workplace by Microsoft found that in decisions which require accountability, we still want humans to be the ones making the call. Speaking after the report's release, Alexia Cambon, senior research director at the company, told Metro that there was a 'primal question' over how we should manage this new type of intelligence. She cited a recent paper by AI thinker Daniel Susskind, looking at what work will remain for humans to do once AI has thoroughly integrated into the workplace. 'One of them is the moral imperatives of society,' she said. 'As a society, I can't see a shortterm future anyway in which we will be happy for agents to manage humans. 'An agent can't make me feel seen, an agent can't can't make me feel connected to another human.' Mr Susskind said his view would be that ultimately, the paid work left for humans would be 'none at all', but that there are currently 'moral limits,' where human beings believe they require a 'human in the loop'. More Trending Michael Laakasuo, the lead investigator in the assisted dying study, said: 'Our research highlights the complex nature of moral judgements when considering AI decision-making in medical care. 'People perceive AI's involvement in decision-making very differently compared to when a human is in charge. 'The implications of this research are significant as the role of AI in our society and medical care expands every day. 'It is important to understand the experiences and reactions of ordinary people so that future systems can be perceived as morally acceptable.' Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Aldi salmon recalled in the US over fears of 'life-threatening' risk MORE: Travel warnings to Brits visiting Turkey over 'organ harvesting' after Beth Martin's 'heart removed' MORE: 'When I die, who will look after my special needs son?'
CNBC
19-05-2025
- CNBC
9-to-5 employees are interrupted every 2 minutes by meetings, emails and other pings, says Microsoft—how to focus
The workday is full of distractions. In fact, during the 9-to-5, employees are interrupted every two minutes by meetings, emails and other pings, according to Microsoft's recent report 2025: The Year the Frontier Firm Is Born. And this "isn't taking into account if you have WhatsApp open or if you have Spotify or YouTube open," says Alexia Cambon, senior research director at Microsoft. "Those are additional signals that are probably also adding to the disruptions." If you feel like constant distractions are getting in the way of you actually doing your job, there are methods to ensure you have dedicated quiet time to get things done. Here's what experts recommend. There are several ways to create protected blocks of time in which to do work. First, "determine when you're most productive," says Monster career expert Vicki Salemi. Is it "30 minutes mid-morning or right before lunch?" Figure out when it's beneficial to have those specific windows. Then, "schedule blocks of time on your calendar and treat it like an important meeting," she says. "Don't blow it off." You can even set an alarm on your phone or computer to alert you to when it's time to buckle down uninterrupted. Think, too, about where you'll be most productive. "Is it a quiet room at work?" says Salemi, "in your cubicle or office while listening to music?" Then, set aside your phone, close your email and turn off notifications. And "if you're working from home," she says, "tell everyone in your household you're in an important meeting." You can create blocks of quiet time as short as 20 minutes. When you're figuring out how to focus during the day, remember that "sometimes quiet time doesn't take place in front of a desk," says Salemi. "You might have an a-ha moment while going for a power walk," for example. Cambon uses a similar tactic to ensure she has some focused moments. During the workday, "I have this standing 45-minute run on my diary every day that I obey religiously," she says, "not just for my mental health and for my clarity, but honestly, it's the place I get my best ideas." Before she leaves, she lets her team know, "guys, I'm taking 45 minutes for a run, please do the same," she says. "It's important to see it role modeled up top that this is something that is permissible." However you block off time, the point is to focus on identifying noise "throughout our day and aim to minimize it so it doesn't manage us," says Salemi.
Forbes
30-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Why 2025 Grads Can Expect A Tough Job Market
This is a published version of Forbes' Careers Newsletter. Click here to subscribe and get it in your inbox every Tuesday. 2025 college graduates are entering a tough job market as the economy shrinks and more experience ... More workers who've been laid off compete for the same positions. Between a slowing economy, an influx of former federal workers looking for new jobs and an overall tightening labor market, the job prospects for 2025 graduates aren't looking too bright. While college students across the country will sit for their final exams in the coming weeks, the reality of life after school will likely be much different from what they expect: About 82% of students in of the class of 2025 anticipate having a full-time job three months after graduation, while only 77% of recent graduates have accomplished that, according to a ZipRecruiter survey. There is an increasing gap between those that can land a job quickly versus those taking six months or more to find a full-time gig. Nursing or health science majors should be able to find employment a bit easier, as these two sectors led employment gains in the last month. But jobs for computer science majors and software engineers have slowed—unless you have AI skills. Political science majors are also seeing their job prospects shrink. The federal government is contracting thanks to DOGE-led cuts, eliminating early-career fellowships and other opportunities for thousands across the country. For the government jobs left at the state and local level, recent grads are likely competing with those departing from federal jobs. To make matters worse, internships aren't converting to full-time employment as frequently as before, according to a survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Still, graduates are optimistic: About 83% said they were confident in their job prospects after commencement, according to a Monster report. We'll keep our eyes out for this week's upcoming labor report to see exactly what 2025 grads will be facing. Practical insights and advice from Forbes staff and contributors to help you succeed in your job, accelerate your career and lead smarter. Instead of rage quitting, try these four tactics before ruining your career. Go the extra mile and more tips on getting an entry-level role without previous experience. The pros and cons of using your Bilt reward points to pay off student loans. Senior research director Alexia Cambon breaks down what "frontier firms" mean and how employees can ... More push their bosses to adopt the same mindset. AI use is becoming an increasingly important part of work. From taking courses on 'AI skills' to AI agents that should increase our productivity, companies are pushing for AI adoption at different rates. The most proactive have been coined 'frontier firms' by a new Microsoft work trends report. I spoke with report author and senior research director Alexia Cambon about what this means for employees outside of frontier firms and how workers can advocate for more AI use. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. The adoption task seems pretty straightforward for workers at 'frontier firms.' But what happens to those working at companies behind the curve? Your organization needs you to become a frontier firm employee, even if it's not a frontier firm. I see this even within my own team. So for example, I have a data scientist who's the best data scientist in the world. But we are also actively bringing in all the data science tools you can imagine that allow me to rely less on him for data science. Our entire relationship is about data science, so that naturally raises questions. For him, it's: 'What does that mean for the work I do?' I have never seen anyone go after AI and agents as quickly or as hungrily as this man. He has literally built half of the agents for you. He's gone out and experimented with everything left, right, and center. Ultimately, we need him desperately. Even if his data science skills can be done through agents, his ingenuity and figuring out how agents can be used for data science, I need that from him. So that's what I would say to employees reading the report and wondering, 'What does this mean for me? I don't work in a frontier firm.' Just last year's report saw that employees were bringing AI to work, whether it was secret or not. We need employees to do that and force the conversation, because that is the type of employee that will be most needed. One that is really hungry to go out there and initiate the change. That's a big shift from last year, right? Now employers, instead of workers, are pushing AI adoption. Where is this coming from? I think it just points to the fact that business demands are increasing because the pace is accelerating so quickly. At the level it's at now, it is just too fast for humans alone to deal with, especially with this emphasis on productivity and efficiency, and we're not running out of work. It's funny, there are these conflicting tensions of people being terrified that AI is coming for their jobs and that we're not going to have any jobs left, versus organizations needing productivity, needing more capacity. I personally don't think we're running out of work. I don't think we'll ever run out of work to do. We live in an age of convenience––everything is available at the press of a button! And work is a constant balance of energy. You probably have types of work that really drain you of energy and types of work that really energize you and make you excited and happy. We don't wanna spend our energy budget on the types of work that drain us. That's what AI is here to do––to lift the mundane out of our work. So how can employees master these 'AI skills' to make their work life easier? I wouldn't say there's any one right way, the outcomes will dictate what works best. But I think there's a responsibility on every employee to take full advantage of the training that their company is providing. And if the company isn't providing any training, then shout out from the rooftops and say that if we wanna stay relevant and competitive we need to train the entire workforce to have these skills. We see the beginnings of AI usage becoming part of performance reviews or job development considerations. So the infrastructure will continue to grow around this to really incentivize people to use it, the same way today we can't imagine doing, say our taxes, without the internet. News from the world of work. Elissa Butterfield spent years of her life responding to Elon Musk's ever-shifting demands as one of his assistants. Now, she's investing in his companies as general partner at Island Green Capital Management, Forbes' John Hyatt reports. DOGE staffers in the National Labor Relations Board are causing a stir. Days after an April whistleblower report alleged that DOGE misappropriated sensitive labor dispute data, DOGE staffers paid a visit to the Washington, D.C. office. Now, agency leaders have told its staffers that those talking to the press will 'face serious legal consequences,' ProPublica reports. Did you bring your kids to work last week? As offices welcomed the children of staffers, a pair of 13-year-olds surprised Pepsi and CEOs during their earnings calls. The children of Jefferies analyst Kaumil Gajrawala asked the CEOs questions about their finances as they visited their dad, even beating another analyst to a question, Bloomberg reports. In layoffs news of the week, UPS announced it would let 20,000 workers go this year as it cut its Amazon shipments for 2025, and Meta has let go of workers in its Reality Labs group, which houses its metaverse and virtual reality endeavors. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency reportedly told nearly 300 staffers they would be either fired or reassigned. Over 100 lawyers and staff in the DOJ's civil rights division have reportedly resigned or taken the administration's deferred resignation program, as the president shifts the division's mission as part of his larger battle against diversity, equity and inclusion measures. And while Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth hates DEI, his deputy billionaire Steven Feinberg has poured millions into the cause, Forbes' Dan Alexander reports. Meet The Founder Behind AI Training Videos Despite a cooling job market, what professionals can expect shorter job searches right now? A. Sales B. Research C. Human Resources D. All of the above Check if you got it right here.
Time Magazine
28-04-2025
- Business
- Time Magazine
AI Agents and What Comes After the Org Chart
By In their latest Work Trend Index Annual Report released this week, Microsoft researchers address some of the biggest unresolved questions prompted by businesses' use of AI, including what it means for the quality and quantity of jobs and how the organization and management of companies need to evolve. Some takeaways from the report: Some 33% of senior executives globally say they will consider using AI to reduce headcount in the next 12 to 18 months. Some 45% say they will consider maintaining headcount but using AI as 'digital labor.' Nearly half of executives say their organizations are using AI agents to fully automate processes. Leading-edge businesses are more likely than their peers to use AI for marketing, customer success, internal communications, and data science. As AI agents come into increasing use, Microsoft posits that the organizational chart—also known as the 'org chart' or organigram— could be replaced by a 'work chart.' This is 'a dynamic, outcome-driven model where teams form around goals, not functions, powered by agents that expand employee scope,' write Microsoft's researchers. AI will allow workers to do 'more complex, strategic work,' earlier in their careers, according to 83% of executives surveyed. Around-the-clock availability is the number one reason workers say they use AI over turning to a colleague or a manager, with 42% saying that. AI could help manage the intense pace of white-collar work. Work-related messages have increased 15% outside of the 9am-5pm workday, compared to a year earlier, and meetings after 8pm are up 16%. Edits in PowerPoint documents surge 122% in the final 10 minutes before a meeting, suggesting workers are pushed right up against deadlines as much as, or more than, ever. Microsoft found that workers at firms with more pervasive AI usage don't seem to experience such disrupted, long workdays as much. To further explore these issues, we spoke with Microsoft senior research director Alexia Cambon, who led the research in the latest report. Here are excerpts from that conversation, edited for space and clarity: You write in the report about the shift from an org chart to a 'work chart.' If I wanted to create a work chart, are there any models? We explored several, and it's telling that we decided not to put any in the report. Because, for one, it's very hard to imagine what work looks like. The second part is that work as we know it today will change. So it's hard to create an org chart for work we don't know exists yet. But we saw some principles that we felt could help shape what the work chart looks like. The first being obviously that it's shaped around jobs to be done, not around siloed areas of expertise, which is how the org chart works today. We specialize very early in the human life cycle, and then we build companies around that specialized human expertise. When expertise doesn't live in humans anymore, but lives in agents in addition to humans, you can start to question whether or not the org can be structured differently. So we call out the Hollywood model as one example of a different type of org chart where on movie sets right now, they draw in the best experts, the best cinematographer, the actors, the crew, and then they all work on a movie for nine months and then they disband and never come together again unless they're making the sequel. That's one scenario. Another one that we raised in the report is the idea of agent-first functions and human-first functions. The way you structure the org chart is we are going to divide work up based on what is the best type of work for an agent to do, and what is the best type of work for a human to do? That is a big question every leader should be asking themselves right now. The Hollywood model is a successful model, but it's different from most people's models for employment. What are the implications for the quantity of jobs and the permanence of jobs? People today have jobs indefinitely in organizations because they have expertise that sits in an org chart and what you're describing is a different model…. For one, I don't think we're going to run out of work, and I don't think digital labor will substitute human labor. The Hollywood model, the reason that model is hard to replicate in current corporate organizations, it's because beyond the monetary costs associated with talent—which again are justifiable; real talent, real expertise costs money because it's not abundant, it's scarce—it also carries a lot of transactional costs. If I want to bring together a team of experts to work on a specific project, there's an onboarding cost, there's an upskilling cost, there's an assimilation cost, and the luxury of time is not something organizations often have. But what happens in a world in which those transactional costs don't exist when you're bringing together agents? That then begs the question again of, what are the types of work that we want to outsource to agents so that we can onboard that expertise much more quickly where it's needed? Then all the things that humans bring to the table—whether that's value or judgment or high-stakes decision making or friction and collaboration, which is an incredibly important aspect of human work—where are those needed and where do we then want to pay more of those transactional costs because it's worth it? What would you say are the enduring skills for humans to focus on, to train for in this scenario that you're foreseeing? You're essentially asking what are the skills that AI will rarify? It will be all the things that AI and agents can't do. The ability to feel connected to another human is not something an agent can provide. Daniel Susskind is a great AI economist and he released a paper that I loved a few weeks ago that literally asked the question, what will remain for humans to do? He comes up with three categories, the first of which is the types of work where it's just more efficient for a human to partner with AI, not to outsource it fully to AI. The second is where we have a human preference for humans to do the work. For example, if I was to go get a medical diagnosis, maybe I don't want to get that from an agent. Maybe I prefer to get that from my human doctor. The third one is moral imperatives. Where have we as a society decided we are holding ourselves accountable for this decision being made by a human? All of those types of work, my hypothesis would be that they involve fundamentally very human traits. The ability for us to feel connected, the ability for us to feel seen. Those are not things agents can provide. There's a recent study of material scientists that showed that their happiness went down even as AI made them much more productive. And there's the study of coders using GitHub Copilot that showed that their collaboration and interaction with colleagues went down when they're using AI tools. This research suggests that when you use AI tools, your job satisfaction and your collaboration could both drop. Do you have any analysis there? Have you read the 'cybernetic teammate' paper? It's an experiment they ran with Proctor & Gamble, about 700 employees. That found the opposite to what you said. They saw outcomes across quality, speed, but also satisfaction go up for individuals and teams equipped with AI. There are a lot of variable factors that we need to take into consideration when we are looking at the outcomes of these studies. But I will say what we found in the data for this research, one of the questions we ask people is, why do you turn to AI over a colleague specifically? Not just why do you turn to AI in general—why do you turn to AI over a colleague? My hypothesis going into that question was that the answers would be all related to things to do with frustrations about your human colleagues. So Alexia is really slow, or I don't find Alexia to be particularly fun to work with. All those things ranked bottom. The least selected one was, I can take the full credit when I work with AI as opposed to working with a human colleague. All the things that ranked top were to do with the net new unique qualities of AI that I don't think people are talking enough about. The top most selected answer was 24-7 availability. That's something we've never really experienced before, having a 24-7 on-demand resource that we can turn to. The second selected answer was machine speed and quality. The fact that AI can compute a thousand data points in a second can reign over large amounts of data. That's not something a human can do, quite rightfully. So the fact that our attention is finite is why it's so valuable. Then the third one was ideas on tap. The fact that if I were to ask you now, Kevin, give me a great idea in the next three seconds, you'd probably struggle—with good reason. You're a human. You need the creative environment to stimulate you to provide that idea, but you can do that with AI. That told me that AI is not substituting humans. In collaboration, it's an additive force.
CNBC
28-04-2025
- Business
- CNBC
17% of employees who use AI at work do so to avoid co-worker judgment: But workplace connection 'is a key to finding happiness'
As AI becomes more advanced and prolific in the workplace, employees find new ways to use it to improve their performance. In Microsoft's recent 2025: The Year the Frontier Firm Is Born report, the company wanted to get a sense of how people use AI in the workplace. Among their questions for the 31,000 workers across 31 countries they surveyed was, "in the past year, which tasks have you relied more on AI for than a human colleague?" says Alexia Cambon, senior research director at Microsoft. They found workers turn to AI more often than people for help with information search, data analysis, brainstorming and creative thinking. Microsoft's follow up question was "why?" says Cambon. While many choose the tech for its 24/7 availability and its "endless stream of ideas on demand," some turn to it for more emotional reasons. Nearly a fifth, 17% of people working on the aforementioned tasks turn to AI more than a colleague for "fear of human judgment," Microsoft found. Happiness expert and TEDx speaker Jessica Weiss is not surprised that for some people, AI "starts to become a stand-in for human connection. But oftentimes and unfortunately, it's not for the better." Here's why she believes people are leaning into AI in this way and how to avoid doing it. Human interaction can be nerve wracking — especially in the workplace, which has its own unique culture. "I think that we're all plagued with social awkwardness," says Weiss. The pandemic only compounded that, she says, and even though it's been five years, "I do feel there's a bit of that social anxiety hangover." So it's no wonder people are afraid of being judged. But it's critical to interact with people, even in the workplace. "Connection and friendship at work is a key to finding happiness and satisfaction at work," she says. Try to have "just one interaction, just one conversation, just one collaboration" at work, regardless of how hard it is, says Weiss. It makes "a huge difference" for your well-being. And AI can help with this. "Use AI to kind of grease the wheels of collaboration," she says, "but not to replace collaboration." Turn to your generative AI tool of choice, for example, to ask it how to start work conversations that make you a bit nervous to. Or use it to generate ideas before a brainstorm that can give your team a foundation to build their next product on. AI can be a great tool, but the point is to "use AI to improve connections at work," says Weiss, not replace them.
