From the Front Lines: What’s Happening With AI Today (Part 3)

By Dr. David Bray

This article was first published here on June 14 2019.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to join Dr. Caryl Bryzmialkiewicz, Assistant Inspector General and Chief Data Officer at the Department of Health and Human Services and Dr. Anthony Scriffignano, Senior Vice President & Chief Data Scientist, Dun & Bradstreet for a webinar “preview” of the deeper discussions planned for the 24 June summit focused on “Going Faster Together: Advancing AI Governance, Big Data, and Ethics Across Sectors and Nations”.

At about the same time I also recorded a video with colleagues Derry Goberdhansingh, founder and CEO of Harper-Paige and Dr. Fredrik Bruhn who is CEO of Unibap on the what is happening with AI today and the expected impacts on the Future of Work. That video has now been shared online and is also embedded below.

Given the way we work is going to change, what we need to do now is help people re-frame their sense of purpose from not being tied to the job they specifically do. Moreover, how do we make sure that the benefits of AI don’t go to a very few and pay them a lot and then everybody else is essentially serfs or not paid a lot? That is a larger economic question, which is, how do we make sure the benefits of AI endeavors uplifts everyone as opposed to just a few?

There also needs to be an awareness that AI, if done well, will illuminate the fact that we humans have biases and we will always have biases. Education can help make us more aware of them to a degree however we’re never going to be unbiased because part of what makes us human are our experiences which in turn bias us as well. At the same time, if we’re beginning to become more reliant on machine learning, we do need to consider new organizational approaches to have checks and balances relative to both human and AI biases.

These conversations all built upon an earlier CxOTalk I did with Michael Krigsman and Shirley Malcom Director, Education and Human Resources Programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) on a similar topic. Without diving into the full CxOTalk video (I’ve posted a link both here and to the full video below) — the main take away from the conversation with Shirley Malcom was AAAS and other training-related data shows that what AI probably will do is replace parts of jobs. Maybe jobs will be replaced fully, but in most cases it will be about replacing parts of jobs. The way that we work is going to change.

Preparing for Future Disruption and Impact

Organizations may need to put in place a board structure that is responsible for ensuring that the data sets are sufficient to inform the use of AI by the organization and sufficiently diverse. It could be this board function involves not just people from your company, but external people as well to help look at the decisions the machine is making and evaluate if these decisions are ethical, are they correct, and are they fair?

So here are three videos, first the most recent one with Derry Goberdhansingh, founder and CEO of Harper-Paige and Dr. Fredrik Bruhn who is CEO of Unibap on the what is happening with AI today and the expected impacts on the Future of Work: