AI, Big data, Automation,
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Keynote at the Microsoft Build event on May 8th 2017 raises important questions about the role that the tech industry has in making sure AI doesn't generate deeply damaging unintended consequences but it also skirts the impact of intended consequences. It also highlights a scary truth, AI is long out of the academic research projects and in the hands of real product development teams. Satya says something I have not seen before. He points out that the future impact of AI depends upon the decisions of individual developers, program managers, business analysts, etc. who make the actual product design decisions behind the software that we use. In my time as a manager in Microsoft's product development organization in Redmond I saw the enormous scale of these software projects. Some are huge but many are small to medium sized teams with autonomy to do really whatever they want. I oversimplify a lot but the important point is that software isn't really a part of some large plan, it is the sum of huge number of individual decisions made by lots of people.
This is a real issue and the big AI houses - including Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, IBM - should address this with internal standards and safeguards. Individual responsibility is crucial and creating a culture that cares about the impact of AI and not just the advancement and application of it is crucial as well. The unintended consequences of AI gone wrong are troubling enough. But we need to really start addressing the intended ones. At the same presentation Satya spoke about the impact on blue collar jobs but that isn't the end of it all. the destruction of millions of driver and warehouse jobs is not the really big problems to solve (although the impact will be huge) but the what happens when large numbers of very broad ranges of high-paying information age and white collar jobs including lawyers, doctors, IT, programming, accounting are made unnecessary but not replaced by new categories of jobs as quickly.
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AuthorMichael Zammuto is the CEO of Completed.com and Cloud Commerce and a strategic adviser to several startups. Mike's background is in SaaS services, B2C sites and B2B firms and has worked extensively in online reputation, digital marketing and branding. Archives
October 2019
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