ACADEMIA Letters

“Once upon a time….an artificial intelligent people

manager”
Sílvio Manuel da Brito, Polytechnic Institute of Tomar

Abstract
Once upon a time, a people manager wrote and spoke directly and in a personalized way with
people at any time and in any place. He liked to communicate with all employees simul-
taneously at any time and place, and in any language, on any subject in our area. I would
like to know where all the employees were and share with them the organization’s mission,
objectives, and strategy. However, he reflected on being able to jeopardize the employee’s
discretion and dignity but also the order and dignity of the things, probably because there is a
risk of constituting a negative power that can jeopardize the existence of the organization but
also humans and the practice of social humanism. This new current of life is called the “Life
Chain” because it is about life, energy, and existence, which can compromise the current one
in the face of a new existence or a new type of it. We are talking about Artificial Intelligence1.
Using a monographic method, we aleatory choose some examples from the literature to aid
this simple reflection about this issue namely ethical and values.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, people management, technology, ethics, values

Theoretical Foundation
Although the term Artificial Intelligence has entered our common lexicon, few people know
exactly what it is about, and even so, they know little. It seems strange but it is fashionable and

Academia Letters, June 2022 ©2022 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Sílvio Manuel da Brito, silvio.brito@ipt.pt

Citation: Brito, S.M.D. (2022). “Once upon a time….an artificial intelligent people manager”. Academia
Letters, Article 5627.

1
there is a lively discussion about its advantages and disadvantages2, but do we know what this
branch of psychology as a science is, what it studies, what practical applications it has?3 The
truth is that many times our Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) knowledge does not go beyond that it
has anything to do with computers, does it?4 Nothing is more artificial than its denomination5.
It is not worth going to the concept’s beginnings, but we must understand that at its genesis
is the concern to reduce errors6, to overcome human limitations in carrying out some tasks,
some due to their complexity7, others due to repetition or even the impossibility of the human
being to reach certain places, given that intelligence in the broadest sense means knowledge,
intellectual life8. Developing sensations, understanding, conscientiousness, are intelligence
operative functions9, and it is there that, in summary, AI is born from the need to help hu-
man beings obtain the benefits associated with it, being undeniable, namely, to find more
productive solutions10, from health to mobility, from management to work, from creativity
to competitiveness. In addition, the legitimate concern of providing human beings with more
free time for enjoyment and creativity has always been associated with AI11, and this is also
not subject to great dispute, at least in its initial development stages.
But there are always obstacles or risks associated with it, being numerous, not quantified,
in fact not even listed since we seem to be losing control over all the variables that are in
the equation here, and clearly, because chaos is not quantifiable but qualifiable, and it is a
question of order and power, whose developments associated with AI are immense and partly
frightening, with fear and fascination being it’s triggers12.
Nothing of this kind of intelligence exists except in the state of the possible13, this quality
is a dangerous question for how far it is possible or how far it is implied. Mankind goes as far
as he can sacrifice, as well as subjugate, volunteer, limit, and explore, to the detriment of the
true asceticism of artificial intelligence, which is to use an infinity of knowledge that we are
not aware of14. The danger is there.
If the relatively peaceful use of AI is, for example, in the automotive industry where we
currently see a car being completely built without the human being touching any of its com-
ponents with their hands, there are, however, other aspects of using AI that when posing
important ethical questions15 force us to question its use in another way, or if we want to ask
another type of question.
In other words, if there is a relative consensus on technological developments that allow
AI to replace humans with extreme effectiveness in certain types of tasks, on the other hand,
scientific investments around the development of AI and its extension to increasingly more
areas “strangers” of community life brought to the centre of the discussion all issues related
to the inclusion of socio-emotional competences in robots16.
It is precisely in this matter that the doubts are more than many and the fears of going

Academia Letters, June 2022 ©2022 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Sílvio Manuel da Brito, silvio.brito@ipt.pt

Citation: Brito, S.M.D. (2022). “Once upon a time….an artificial intelligent people manager”. Academia
Letters, Article 5627.

2
beyond the limits of what is acceptable either17. The ruthless terminator fiction seems to
become a reality.

Methods
Using the monographic method, we collected some examples, which we choose through some
randomly selected readings that we believe would be interesting, of AI’s recent use in various
domains and the ethical issues they raise:

• Are the complex and organized affect life manifestations disaggregated from the intel-
lectual order18, such as, for example, fear replacing courage, diligence for laziness.

• In 2017, the Channel brand used 3 robots on the catwalk in its annual fashion show. The
question is, why and for what?19 Replace the aesthetic emotion with a moral emotion.

• The latest versions of humanoid robots reveal themselves with the capacity for conver-
sation and movements that manifest an emotional matrix that we would previously only
recognize in other human beings. In this sense, Japanese television presented two AI as
TV news pivots with the ability to show facial expressions revealing emotions20. Why
and for what? To encourage the spectator’s affective, violent, and intense state with an
increase or suspension of their movements, as is the case with “love at first sight”.

• Mina, the AI created by Microsoft in Japan, was designed to have the “personality” of a
teenage student with almost bipolar behaviour, going from joy to depression extremely
quickly. This IS having an account on Twitter and Line, has millions of followers and is
going through a phase of deep depression21. Question – Why and for what? To create
rough-shock emotions, with no apparent purpose for people to interpret themselves as
rough or stronger.

• Toyota developed a companion robot, the Kirobo Mini, in which affection capacity was
developed, which is available on the market to combat loneliness for less than 400 dol-
lars. In this specific case, instead of stimulating the sociability inherent to the human
being’s DNA, there seems to be certain conformity to the loneliness phenomenon, re-
sorting to AI to deal with it22. In other words, what can become a serious mental health
problem is not attacked in its genesis, but a technological solution is found to address it.
Question – Why and for what? Is it the sexuality replacement as an effective agent with
the excuse that there are no sexually transmitted diseases, and encourage false autism?

Academia Letters, June 2022 ©2022 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Sílvio Manuel da Brito, silvio.brito@ipt.pt

Citation: Brito, S.M.D. (2022). “Once upon a time….an artificial intelligent people manager”. Academia
Letters, Article 5627.

3
 • Google Brain developed AI ways that evolved to the point of creating their crypto-
graphic algorithms to talk in secret, without a third intelligence understanding the ex-
changed messages. The initial pair of intelligence created their neural network to com-
municate safely, without anyone understanding them, not even the humans who in-
vented them. This is deeply disturbing and raises unprecedented ethical questions,
causing us to wonder if we are going too far and losing control of something that was
initially thought to make life easier for us23. Not being a philosophical word, life is
existence. How to give existence to something that exists but that is assumed to be non-
existent? To encourage nothing. The nonexistence? Or do we think we are gods who
create beings with free will? Here we ask ourselves, for what and why?

Discussion
We have given these examples because, in our opinion, the AI evolution is having seems
to have to underlie a certain “euphoria” around its infinite potential and little concern for
its ethical and legally used frame, with possible abuses being unthinkable without proper
regulation. A large part of the community of thinkers, scientists, and others, aware of these
dangers, make their voices heard and are concerned for the real danger we incur – becoming
“monster” hostages24.
The fundamental sociological question underlying all these questions has to do with what
differentiates us from any machine and which is a variable that we must never give up –
emotions25. What is supposedly the greatest human beings’ fragility that makes behaviours
unpredictable is their ability to be moved differently and according to stimuli that cannot be
standardized, which could be their greatest weapon to not become an AI hostage. However,
the danger is real since there is an immense lack of control over the way of used technology
and by whom used it.
On the other hand, this “enthusiasm” about technology has increased one of the greatest
humanity plagues in the 21st century - the increasing incapacity of human beings to relate
face to face, with interpersonal and affective relationships and the management of conflicts
at hand26. be done more and more on the virtual plane, without touching the skin, without
smell, in real life.
Even more, it made the human being lazier in investing in his intellectual development.
He thinks less, made fewer questions, and is more easily manipulated through the proliferation
of unfiltered information that exists on the Web, much of it false and conditioning the knowl-
edge and opinion construction27. This is an immense and underappreciated danger. Initially
what was thought to give Mankind more time and space for fruition, creativity, and affection

Academia Letters, June 2022 ©2022 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Sílvio Manuel da Brito, silvio.brito@ipt.pt

Citation: Brito, S.M.D. (2022). “Once upon a time….an artificial intelligent people manager”. Academia
Letters, Article 5627.

4
management, had exactly the opposite effect, making human beings increasingly a slave to
technologies and less and less sensitive and critical about what surrounds them.
Katryna Dow, the Meeco founder and chief executive officer, the global technology com-
pany that launched a world-leading platform for data independence for people and that grants
individuals choice and sovereignty rights in the way they interact in the digital world and with
the Internet of Things28, states that “life experiences are shaped by our values and ethics,
therefore, we must know how to regulate AI based on our values and enforce the ethical pre-
cepts that reinforce our Humanity”.
On the other hand, and referring to this statement, we know that most initiatives in Arti-
ficial Intelligence are being developed predominantly by youngers, engineers in the majority,
which conditions and substantially reduces the scope of the so-called ethical regulation of
AI29.
Intrinsically linked to this issue is the fact that we are increasingly obliged to provide
our data to access and use platforms, whether governmental or leisure, a fact that makes hu-
man beings a profusion of mobile data subject to constant collection and permanent analysis.
This seemingly innocent fact is addressed very clearly and disturbingly by Cathy O’Neil in
“Weapons of Mathematical Destruction”,30 in which the author demonstrates this informa-
tion danger in the wrong people’s hands – and increase in all social ills with an emphasis on
social inequalities as social distance, racism, xenophobia, and other problems.

Conclusions
For this to be effectively avoided, an in-depth discussion and ethical clarification, in the AI use
and development, is essential as the existing legislation in terms of data and identity protection
is not sufficient31.
The AI potential is immense but not less devastating and can be dangerous if its use is not
tightly regulated, and Humanity could be living on a destruction pre-warning, at least with
societal organization and conventional forms of power.

Where do we walk?

Managing people, maybe!

Academia Letters, June 2022 ©2022 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Sílvio Manuel da Brito, silvio.brito@ipt.pt

Citation: Brito, S.M.D. (2022). “Once upon a time….an artificial intelligent people manager”. Academia
Letters, Article 5627.

5
References
1. Winston, P. H. (1992). Artificial intelligence. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co.,
Inc.

2. Bhbosale, S., Pujari, V., & Multani, Z. (2020). Advantages And Disadvantages of Artificial
Intelligence. Aayushi International Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 227-230.

3. Sterner, J. (2017). Artificial Intelligence: Practical Applications.

4. Levy, F. (2018). Computers and populism: artificial intelligence, jobs, and politics in the
near term. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 34(3), 393-417.

5. Carrillo, M. R. (2020). Artificial intelligence: From ethics to law. Telecommunications

Policy, 44(6), 101937.

6. Topol, E. J. (2019). High-performance medicine: the convergence of human and artificial

intelligence. Nature medicine, 25(1), 44-56.

7. Castellani, B. (2018). Map of the complexity sciences.

8. de Souza, C. J., & Jacoski, C. A. (2020). Propriedade intelectual para criações de in-
teligência artificial. Brazilian Journal of Development, 6(5), 32344-32356.

9. Abbass, H. A. (2019). Social integration of artificial intelligence: functions, automation

allocation logic and human-autonomy trust. Cognitive Computation, 11(2), 159-171.

10. Mohammed, I. A. The Interaction Between Artificial Intelligence and Identity and Access
Management: An Empirical Study. International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts
(IJCRT), ISSN, 2320(2882), 668-671.

11. Gobet, F., & Sala, G. (2019). How artificial intelligence can help us understand human
creativity. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 1401.

12. Wirth, N. (2018). Hello marketing, what can artificial intelligence help you with? Inter-
national Journal of Market Research, 60(5), 435-438.

13. Vrontis, D., Christofi, M., Pereira, V., Tarba, S., Makrides, A., & Trichina, E. (2022).
Artificial intelligence, robotics, advanced technologies, and human resource management:
a systematic review. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 33(6),
1237-1266.

Academia Letters, June 2022 ©2022 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Sílvio Manuel da Brito, silvio.brito@ipt.pt

Citation: Brito, S.M.D. (2022). “Once upon a time….an artificial intelligent people manager”. Academia
Letters, Article 5627.

6
14. Belle, V. (2020, September). Symbolic logic meets machine learning: A brief survey in
infinite domains. In International Conference on Scalable Uncertainty Management (pp.
3-16). Springer, Cham.

15. Brendel, A. B., Mirbabaie, M., Lembcke, T. B., & Hofeditz, L. (2021). Ethical manage-
ment of artificial intelligence. Sustainability, 13(4), 1974.

16. Weber, J. (2008). Human-robot interaction. In Handbook of Research on Computer-

Mediated Communication (pp. 855-867). IGI Global.

17. Birkle, C. (2022). “I, Robot”: Artificial Intelligence and Fears of the Posthuman. Arti-
ficial Intelligence and Human Enhancement: Affirmative and Critical Approaches in the
Humanities, 21, 237.

18. Gessl, A. S., Schlögl, S., & Mevenkamp, N. (2019). On the perceptions and acceptance
of artificially intelligent robotics and the psychology of the future elderly. Behaviour &
Information Technology, 38(11), 1068-1087.

19. Jarek, K., & Mazurek, G. (2019). Marketing and Artificial Intelligence. Central Euro-
pean Business Review, 8(2).

20. Humphrey, D. (2021). Sensing the human: biometric surveillance and the Japanese
technology industry. Media, Culture & Society, 01634437211036996.

21. Nambiappan, H. R., Arboleda, S. A., Lundberg, C. L., Kyrarini, M., Makedon, F., &
Gans, N. (2022). MINA: A Robotic Assistant for Hospital Fetching Tasks. Technologies,
10(2), 41.

22. Arora, A. S., & Arora, A. (2020). The race between cognitive and artificial intelligence:
Examining socio-ethical collaborative robots through anthropomorphism and xenocen-
trism in human-robot interaction. International Journal of Intelligent Information Tech-
nologies (IJIIT), 16(1), 1-16.

23. Livingston, S., & Risse, M. (2019). The future impact of artificial intelligence on humans
and human rights. Ethics & international affairs, 33(2), 141-158.

24. Fuchs, D. J. (2018). The dangers of human-like bias in machine-learning algorithms.

Missouri S&T’s Peer to Peer, 2(1), 1.

25. Prentice, C., Dominique Lopes, S., & Wang, X. (2020). Emotional intelligence or artifi-
cial intelligence–an employee perspective. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Manage-

Academia Letters, June 2022 ©2022 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Sílvio Manuel da Brito, silvio.brito@ipt.pt

Citation: Brito, S.M.D. (2022). “Once upon a time….an artificial intelligent people manager”. Academia
Letters, Article 5627.

7
 ment, 29(4), 377-403.

26. Garcia, D. (2018). Lethal artificial intelligence and change: The future of international
peace and security. International Studies Review, 20(2), 334-341.

27. Vrontis, D., Christofi, M., Pereira, V., Tarba, S., Makrides, A., & Trichina, E. (2022).
Artificial intelligence, robotics, advanced technologies, and human resource management:
a systematic review. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 33(6),
1237-1266.

28. Harold, S. W., Brunelle, G., Chaturvedi, R., Hornung, J. W., Koshimura, S., Osoba, O.
A., & Suga, C. (2020). United States-Japan Research Exchange on Artificial Intelligence.

29. Di Vaio, A., Palladino, R., Hassan, R., & Escobar, O. (2020). Artificial intelligence and
business models in the sustainable development goals perspective: A systematic literature
review. Journal of Business Research, 121, 283-314.

30. Jain, A. (2018). Book Review: Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neill. Available
at SSRN 3187660.

31. Janssen, M., Brous, P., Estevez, E., Barbosa, L. S., & Janowski, T. (2020). Data gov-
ernance: Organizing data for trustworthy Artificial Intelligence. Government Information
Quarterly, 37(3), 101493.

Academia Letters, June 2022 ©2022 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Sílvio Manuel da Brito, silvio.brito@ipt.pt

Citation: Brito, S.M.D. (2022). “Once upon a time….an artificial intelligent people manager”. Academia
Letters, Article 5627.