Corporate Digital Responsibility New Challenges to the Social Sciences

Contemporary practitioners and scientists more and more frequently highlight the extraordinarily rapid process of implementation of new technologies – including those based on artificial intelligence – and unpredictable consequences of such actions. Therefore, it is important to be an active participant in the debate on the relation between human and modern technologies, a debate based on interdisciplinary scientific knowledge. The article refers to selected ideas related to knowledge management, organisational learning, knowledge area, or innovation environment. The challenge which social science researchers face, next to examining the theoretical aspects, is the application of various calculation methods and new technologies to make quicker and easier decisions in social contexts – with regard to various groups of people, e.g. employees, customers, or voters. Apart from the new methods, another serious challenge is to raise social awareness regarding the digital responsibility in certain groups such as managers or, more generally, employers and employees. The responsibility of the elite and scientific authorities should consist in instilling awareness in one another and approaching the new phenomenon with care. Potential threats may completely change our civilisation. The presented discussion is based on literature study which included selected theories and reports of research centres and scientific bodies. A particularly interesting case study discussed in this article includes TOP CDR initiative and a report prepared by SW RESEARCH agency in cooperation with Procontent public relations and digital marketing agency. The conclusions of this report indicate that corporate digital responsibility (CDR) may be a pioneering area for in-depth empirical studies. The nature of the topic, despite being clearly related to DOI . /IJREL. . . . International Journal of Research in E-learning Vol. ( ), , pp. – Małgorzata Suchacka 6 sociology, requires interdisciplinary approach and cooperation of numerous circles, not only scientific ones. K e y w o r d s: corporate social responsibility, corporate digital responsibility, technology, artificial intelligence Towards Corporate Digital Responsibility – Future or Nowadays Challenges? Contemporary scientific authorities and, more and more frequently, political leaders highlight new kinds of threats to global labour market posed by automation and mass implementation of solutions based on artificial intelligence (AI). Development of new technologies, robotics, and process automation threatens current workplaces in both industry and the service sector. These processes may create social unrest, and their consequences are difficult to foresee due to the dynamic nature of their progression. The aim of the article is to characterise new challenges in corporate digital responsibility and new research areas which emerge in that field for social sciences. The author will identify certain theoretical aspects and potential consequences related to threats posed by the development of new technologies, artificial intelligence, automation, and digitalisation of social environment on a large scale. Selected thematically, relevant reports of scientific bodies, employers’ organisations, and companies collaborating with scientific circles will be analysed. The author will analyse in particular the TOP CDR initiative, which is the first project of this kind in Poland, focused on digitally responsible enterprises. A Few Words about Methods The analysis is based on theoretical considerations substantiated by selected research data. The theoretical themes referred to are part of the author’s selective attempt to indicate significant areas of possible future research. The scope of the analysis is largely based on literature study of selected concepts and is therefore significantly limited. All empirical remarks refer to existing data, reports of research centres and scientific bodies. The analysis will also include the TOP CDR report prepared by SW RESEARCH agency in cooperation with Procontent public relations and digital marketing agency. Corporate Digital Responsibility. New Challenges to the Social Sciences 7 Development of Technologies in the Field of Artificial Intelligence – Responsibility and Challenges in Social Context For many years scientists and experts from virtually all scientific fields have been discussing the relationship between human and technology, which is developing at an increasing rate. These considerations include not only new ways of learning or human reaction to resulting changes in the reality, but also possible social processes which occur or will occur in the future due to technologisation and increasing presence of machines and robots in everyday life. The challenge which social science researchers face is the application of various calculation methods and new technologies to make quicker and easier decisions in social contexts with regard to various groups of people, e.g. employees, customers, or voters. This allows to gather data faster and identify digital traces of human activity – either in social networks or in information obtained during behavioural studies using mobile phones. Access to this type of data provides the ability to stimulate various behaviours. Specialised software used on this kind of data has been perfected at an increasingly fast rate since the 1990s towards study of methods of AI operation. Initially, data compilation software was created to build databases using a specific type of reasoning mechanisms. Nearly 70 years have passed since the first widely recognised definition of artificial intelligence was presented by Alan Turing in 1950. At the time, artificial intelligence was understood, for the purpose of the conducted experiment, as an ability of a machine to perform cognitive tasks effectively without making human interrogator realise that that the respondent is a machine (Turing, 1950). Nowadays, programmers are focused on the creation of intelligent behaviour patterns which may be utilised in computer software. The goal is to develop a model allowing machine to imitate sophisticated human manifestations of intelligence: making decisions under uncertainty, analysis and synthesis of natural languages, conducting logical reasoning, diagnosis, expertise and participation in logic-based games such as chess. Machines already have achieved the ability to learn and perfect their behaviour on the basis of new experience. Using algorithms and specific data, the machines can, through the process of induction, transition from supervised learning to unsupervised learning (Russell & Norvig, 2003). More and more often, people are being replaced by machines, devices, and appropriate software, all through learning specific forms of response based on the output data. Nowadays, the ethical question should be a top priority for scientists, because many people might be really hurt by these algorithms (Suchacka & Horáková, 2019, p. 917). Małgorzata Suchacka 8 This has specific consequences – chances and threats. At the threshold of revolution initiated by introduction of artificial intelligence into various areas of socioeconomic life, an increasing number of socially sensitive practitioners and scientists call for the need to create a complex strategy of AI development. The analysis of selected AI development programmes conducted by Digital Poland Foundation in 2018 points to differences in approach to this matter between various countries. Depending on the government’s policy, emphasis is placed on retaining scientific leadership and development of basic research around AI (France), ensuring national security, order and monitoring behaviour of the citizens (China), maintaining leadership in robotics, increasing the level of industrialisation and supporting ageing society (Japan). The report characterises world’s most prominent centres of innovation and highlights the need to promote economy based on knowledge, cooperation, and sharing experience with the support of the regional and national level authorities (Digital Poland Foundation, 2018). The aware and responsible decision-makers should create conditions favourable for close integration of the worlds of science and business and accelerated commercialisation of the results of their cooperation. The responsibility of the elites and scientific authorities should consist in raising awareness about AI and taking the new phenomenon seriously. Potential threats may completely change our civilisation. The research conducted on the matter is still focused primarily on technical and IT issues, despite the fact that great minds of our times like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking have been warning us against development of a model of artificial intelligence able to continuously improve itself. It is difficult to image what is becoming the reality – machine surpassing human. The most controversial is the use of artificial intelligence in the army [armed forces], from rockets or jets to all kinds of infrastructure control systems. At this stage, it is assumed that people are in control, not threatened by computers deciding anything themselves. It will be this way until the artificial intelligence begins to modify its goals. Even if it is possible for the machine to become self-conscious, it will still have to set tasks for itself and find a justification for them, and that part is not immediately obvious. At the moment, intelligent technologies assist us with acquiring knowledge quickly, learning new behaviors outside the traditional system of education, which, however, should not be completely eliminated. A constant reflection, inherently sociological, should accompany these technological changes, for the algorithms behind ethical actions are the very traits of humanity and it is quite difficult to assume that the machine will accept them or will develop them itself without error of proper access path (Suc