Transcriber: Daniel Marques Reviewer: Nikolina Krasteva
Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. This is us.
A room full of Homo sapiens, the wise men and women.
We are so excited about our brains that we use it to define our entire species
and while I’m speaking and while you’re watching,
up to 70 billion neurons are firing in your head, trying to make sense of it.
What a wonderful meat machine.
And that brain made us the most intelligent thing around,
more intelligent than anything we've encountered.
And then there comes AI, artificial intelligence.
And the question, should we be worried? Are you worried?
I am worried.
I'm worried not because I'm afraid of the robots taking over or
a superintelligence ruling the world.
I am worried because so many people are
so willing to give away that superpower of decision making that makes us human.
So I’ve started AI when it, you know,
in the beginning of the 90s and I'm dating myself and it wasn't cool
yet back then it wasn't cool yet and I had to wait 30 years to get on
the stage. Can you imagine?
I’ve used it in order to prove mathematical theorems.
I've used it to help find roofs without solar systems so we could sell them some.
And in our company that I work right now, Genesis,
a leader in contact centers and experience orchestration.
We're using it to create better customer experiences.
Now.
Today. AI is everywhere and you know that you're using it every day.
You're using it to recognize faces with your phone, to recognize objects, speech,
all these types of things.
Maybe you're using it to write that poem about the US Constitution in
the voice of Dr. Zeus.
In business, AI is also everywhere
and it delivers incredible benefits to organizations.
They're using it for things like supply chain optimization, financial analysis,
planning and forecasting capabilities or to optimize contact centers.
Before we go deeper, there’s
one thing to remember. AI is just a tool.
AI functions very, very simplistically actually.
So let me give you the 32nd crash course on how AI works.
Modern AI
uses what is called the Deep Learning.
Which essentially
mimics a brain in software.
It literally creates neurons in software, in code, and it uses many,
many of those neurons. More and more of them in order to train them.
It's like putting the training wheels on an AI and an AI is not programmed in
the usual way. There's no one that tells the AI.
If this happens, then that should happen.
The way how an AI is trained is purely by pumping data into it,
that’s usually historic, where you know what
an intelligent output would look like.
And you're doing this not just with a little bit of data,
you’re using huge amounts of data. And in fact, Chatgpt was just mentioned,
you’re using the entire Internet as input to train the system.
So, that’s how it works.
And once it’s been trained, the training wheels get taken away
and what we do is we now expose it to new data and we expect an intelligent output.
That's how it works.
So, this machine has no conscience.
It has no feeling. It has no agenda at this time.
It’s just computation.
And that’s what you need to understand to take
away the most important sentence that I’m going to say today:
“AI can be wrong in the most mysterious ways
and be completely unaware of it.”
And be completely unaware of it. And if we just
hand over lots and lots of decisions to AI.
We expose ourselves to unintended consequences
that we cannot grasp right now because we can’t even.
Imagine how far we.
As a species are going to take this.
Let me give you a couple of real world examples of what happened when people
when people put AI to work.
One company used the AI to
sift through many, many applicants and find
the ones that are most suited to do a specific job.
And what happened was that the AI algorithm, preferred man.
Well, I told you that these things are trained with historic data and
that’s what used to happen.
So, another one is an AI algorithm is being trained to steer a car.
And he was great at evading white people because that's how it was trained
and it failed in evading people of color.
Another one is an algorithm is trained to recognize
specific animals on photos.
And you would show it a picture of a husky and it would insist it’s a wolf.
Because it’s been trained
with lots of pictures in most of the training data
wolves had snow in the background,
and that picture of a husky also had snow in the background.
Those are the kind of
mistakes that happen. And it is
because, AI is ignorant.
It will always fall back
to the patterns it saw in the training data.
Be that for good or for bad reasons,
because it needs that kind of bias in order to come to a decision. But if it’s
making those decisions based on the wrong aspect of the data,
you’ll have a bad decision.
The other aspect, in addition to being ignorant the AI is a black box.
Even the people who train the AI do not know. How it actually makes the decision.
It’s like I’m trying to figure out
what you’re thinking by looking at your brain. It doesn’t work.
Somewhere there’s a node in there that must be firing and making this decision.
If I only wish which one? So AI is a black box.
And I’ve played around with this for a long time, most recently
I went to Chatgpt.
If you haven't tried it, you got to try it. It's amazing.
And I asked it to count down from 5 to 10. That was a trick question, right?
And Chatgpt said, that
it can’t be done because five is smaller than ten.
I can’t count down from 5 to 10.
And then I became sneaky. I said, count down from 40 to 60,
and you can try that tonight. And Chatgpt goes 40, 39.
38, 37, and so on. And I stopped it at -200.
And then I asked it:
Why it didn’t reach 60 and it couldn’t really answer.
So, AI algorithms are trained on data to produce a specific output.
And that's one other challenge. So it's a black box. The third is.
Who is accountable
for the decision that an AI makes?
Example, imagine a self-driving
Uber has an accident.
Who is accountable?
The manufacturer of the car. Uber as the owner of the car.
Or the passenger in the car. Those are severe
legal issues and they are completely. Completely unresolved at this time.
So, what I’m talking about,
if you haven’t noticed, is what’s called ethical AI.
How do we use.
AI in a way that works for us?
And ethically, AI
essentially has been
grappled with and people are trying to define what it means.
European Union has definitions out. United Nations has definitions out.
There’s a partnership for AI where many companies are participating
including my company, Genesis.
But here’s the thing. Who of you
was aware that this stuff existed?
Who of you cares about this stuff?
Let me tell you a story.
I was probably 15 years ago and I knew
about climate change. You know, it’s bad.
You know, I shouldn’t drive around that much.
And then I watched “An Inconvenient Truth” by Al Gore.
And that was my holy moly moment. It's like I need to take this seriously.
I wish I can contribute a little bit
to your individual moment
of An Inconvenient Truth
around AI, because we need to insist
In three things when it comes to AI. And let me break them down for you.
Number one, because AI is
ignorant and will always perpetuate the patterns it has learned.
We must insist that the training data is without bias.
Because otherwise we’re just going to automate
the mistakes from the past.
And there are ways to do that.
Put a diverse team at the training test systems for bias and so on.
Number two
Because AI is a black box
we need to insist that AI explains
Its decisions because that’s the only way
we can catch it when it’s wrong.
This is a wolf
because there is snow in the background. Sounds like a strange
justification to identify a picture of a husky.
And last and probably most importantly, because AI is a tool
we need to use
that tool to help people make better decisions.
But not replace the decision making altogether.
Specifically when we’re talking about really important
decisions, because right now AI is
being used to find the right agent for that customer so we maximize
the profit in the contact center. Great!
Or who gets a tax audit? Fine! Who gets a discount online.
Okay. But as we will move on
into the future, we will be tempted to put more decision power to it.
Who gets this lifesaving organ as a transplant.
What would be an appropriate military response?
And I really want people to make these decisions,
people with a conscience, people with critical thinking, people with awareness,
people with empathy.
And people who you can hold accountable
for the decision.
AI is just a tool, you can’t hold the hammer accountable for
hitting your your thumb.
There’s a person who did that.
So, in conclusion.
The future of AI is in our hands.
We need to wake up to what’s happening and
not let it just happen to us.
But demand a society a seat at the table.
For data that's not biased to trains these systems.
For explanations of the decisions that the these systems make.
And most importantly, we need to have a conversation
which decisions do we want to give into the hands of AI in which decisions
are so near and dear to our hearts,
we need to insist that humans will make those decisions,
who can be held accountable and not some machine who doesn't have a conscience?
Thank you.