Signal Building and Governing AI Systems: Advancing Social Workers' Roles across the Technology Industry, Human Service Organizations, and Policy Institutions

Summary

Researchers including Nari Yoo, Daphne Watkins, Brian Perron, Jessica Kane and Matthew Smith published a paper arguing that AI is moving the technology industry into domains long served by social work, including crisis response, mental health care, benefits administration, vocational rehabilitation and child welfare. The authors note that social workers encounter technology as users of tools, as subjects within datasets, and as first responders to deployed systems, yet they study these systems from outside the settings where decisions about them are made. The paper introduces the standard roles on technology product teams and the decisions each controls, and reviews AI-era technology disciplines alongside relevant social work scholarship. Building on this, it identifies five groups of technology decision roles social workers can hold across the technology industry, human service organizations and policy institutions, namely product, governance, organizational technology leadership, grantee collaboration and policy work, using product management as the main example. The authors compare the nine competencies of the 2022 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards against the actual tasks of a product manager to show where social work master's training already teaches the methods the role requires. They then specify the technical understanding these roles need, extend the profession's technology ethics from use to deployment, and close with a research agenda for the social work technology workforce.