>> Karen Parker, editor-in-chief
FROM THE EDITOR
Susan Sutton served as Editor-in-Chief, Integrated Media, of ASI magazine for many years. If you wish to send a letter to the editor, please contact Tom Fowler at fowlert@bnpmedia.com. Letters may be edited for space and clarity.
Humans and Technology in the Workplace: AI, Phishing, Etc.
This issue of ASI focuses on digital innovations and the potential they have to impact our industry. Also included is an article about a visit I made to DELO’s Sudbury, Massachusetts, facility, an article about new dispensing technology that provides added quality control, and an article describing the issues of last-mile delivery. I hope you enjoy this first issue of 2024.
I believe the continuing evolution of digital technology and its ever-changing role in our personal as well as our professional lives is a trend we need to continue to watch and analyze. The power of technologies such as artificial intelligence will continue to grow as computational innovation takes on increasingly complex tasks. Within this context, it is interesting to consider how the uber-technical and the almost mundane human responses and actions interact and impact each other.
Last summer, the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) released a study about how stress in the workplace affected cybersecurity. It concluded that workers feeling a specific form of stress are more likely than others to become victims of a phishing attach. The research studied 153 participants, and while the relatively small sample size made it difficult to distinguish all the relationships among the variables studied, researchers were able to conclude that the relationship between stress and response to a simulated phishing email was statistically significant.
Corey Fallon, psychologist and an author of the study, found that people who reported a high level of work-related distress were significantly more likely to follow a phony phishing email’s link. Every one-point increase in self-reported distress increased the likelihood of responding to the simulated phishing email by 15%. Specifically, the stress was described as the feeling of tension when a worker feels they are in a difficult situation and are unable to tackle the task at hand. This type of stress could come from workers feeling they have too high of a workload, are inadequately trained, or do not have enough time to accomplish assigned work.
We have known for a long time that physical stresses such as lack of sleep take a toll on productivity and safety. It is why airlines and the FAA carefully track and regulate the work hours of flight crews. But I am not sure we have considered enough how something as common as an employee sitting at their desk feeling stressed about whether they can get their work done on time can actually jeopardize security. In a way, such a situation seems small. But a cyber attack instigated by a phishing email can have huge consequences.
Interestingly, one of the solutions offered in the PNNL study was more technology, what a press release about the study termed “human-machine teaming.” The idea is to have an algorithm that recognizes a change in work pattern that could indicate fatigue or inattention, and a “smart machine assistant” would suggest a break from email. Researchers did note that there are employee privacy concerns to be considered when using a “machine assistant.” Also, not considered in that solution is the level of stress added to an employee who knows that a “smart machine assistant” is watching their every move at work.
I might also suggest we consider less technical approaches to this problem, such as employees stepping away from their computers when they are feeling overly stressed. Even simpler, perhaps people feeling overwhelmed at work could engage in the simple stress exercise I recently witnessed from an eight-year-old, who showed me the “starfish exercise,” a breathing technique using your hand as a prompt for breathing in and out, and in the process, calming yourself down.
Starfish exercises aside, my point is that sometimes we don’t need more technology, we just need to think smarter about the situation at hand. There are many problems we face in our jobs that do not call on algorithms to provide a solution. And while all the technology discussed in this issue of ASI is important to know about, let’s not forgot there are many parts, if not most, of modern work that still requires our brains — working on their own — to come up with a solution.
