arXiv subjects

Shreya Chowdhary

Publications and source records attributed to Shreya Chowdhary.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Resisting AI Solutionism through Workplace Collective Action

In the face of increasing austerity and threats of AI-enabled labor replacement at the University of Michigan, a group of workers and students have coalesced around the project of "AI resistance" since Fall 2024. Forming a cross-departmental coalition including librarians, faculty, staff, graduate workers, and undergraduate students, we have hosted a public workshop questioning the techno-deterministic inevitability of AI use at the University and are working with other campus organizations to maintain an ongoing organizing space. This workshop submission incorporates our reflections thus far on the strategies we've employed, the challenges to collective resistance, and our role as workers in resisting AI within the University. Our aim for this work is to provide concrete inspiration for technologists, students, and staff looking to resist AI techno-solutionism within their own universities.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2023

Sensing Wellbeing in the Workplace, Why and For Whom? Envisioning Impacts with Organizational Stakeholders

With the heightened digitization of the workplace, alongside the rise of remote and hybrid work prompted by the pandemic, there is growing corporate interest in using passive sensing technologies for workplace wellbeing. Existing research on these technologies often focus on understanding or improving interactions between an individual user and the technology. Workplace settings can, however, introduce a range of complexities that challenge the potential impact and in-practice desirability of wellbeing sensing technologies. Today, there is an inadequate empirical understanding of how everyday workers -- including those who are impacted by, and impact the deployment of workplace technologies -- envision its broader socio-ecological impacts. In this study, we conduct storyboard-driven interviews with 33 participants across three stakeholder groups: organizational governors, AI builders, and worker data subjects. Overall, our findings surface how workers envisioned wellbeing sensing technologies may lead to cascading impacts on their broader organizational culture, interpersonal relationships with colleagues, and individual day-to-day lives. Participants anticipated harms arising from ambiguity and misalignment around scaled notions of ``worker wellbeing,'' underlying technical limitations to workplace-situated sensing, and assumptions regarding how social structures and relationships may shape the impacts and use of these technologies. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for designing worker-centered data-driven wellbeing technologies.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Can Workers Meaningfully Consent to Workplace Wellbeing Technologies?

Sensing technologies deployed in the workplace can unobtrusively collect detailed data about individual activities and group interactions that are otherwise difficult to capture. A hopeful application of these technologies is that they can help businesses and workers optimize productivity and wellbeing. However, given the workplace's inherent and structural power dynamics, the prevalent approach of accepting tacit compliance to monitor work activities rather than seeking workers' meaningful consent raises privacy and ethical concerns. This paper unpacks the challenges workers face when consenting to workplace wellbeing technologies. Using a hypothetical case to prompt reflection among six multi-stakeholder focus groups involving 15 participants, we explored participants' expectations and capacity to consent to these technologies. We sketched possible interventions that could better support meaningful consent to workplace wellbeing technologies by drawing on critical computing and feminist scholarship -- which reframes consent from a purely individual choice to a structural condition experienced at the individual level that needs to be freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific (FRIES). The focus groups revealed how workers are vulnerable to "meaningless" consent -- as they may be subject to power dynamics that minimize their ability to withhold consent and may thus experience an erosion of autonomy, also undermining the value of data gathered in the name of "wellbeing." To meaningfully consent, participants wanted changes to the technology and to the policies and practices surrounding the technology. Our mapping of what prevents workers from meaningfully consenting to workplace wellbeing technologies (challenges) and what they require to do so (interventions) illustrates how the lack of meaningful consent is a structural problem requiring socio-technical solutions.

cs.HC↗