Humans for AI

I still remember Artificial Intelligence being offered as an elective subject during my postgrad in the early 90s — and, not many people signed up to study AI, as it was considered this mysterious futuristic topic with not much connection to reality. And for the past few years, as I watch AI advance in its abilities across several fields, I remember how these AI abilities were considered too futuristic just a few decades ago. Things we could only imagine are becoming true in our own lifetime!

Having witnessed the technology waves for Internet and Mobile — that originated in the computer science world but impacted everybody, I foresee how AI will soon change work as we know it today. No matter what your job is today, it is going to look slightly different or significantly different due to AI, depending on the actual job itself. AI is still in its infancy today. But as AI advances, we will need subject matter experts, the domain experts actively involved in building out the AI products for their domains.

Take the legal profession as an example. To truly build a robust AI product for the legal field, we will need a lawyer involved in the product design. Very soon, we are going to need lawyers who can understand AI concepts and capabilities and start thinking about what AI lawyer-specific products need to be built out. We will need lawyers who can bridge the gap between tech and law. (And this will be true for almost all professions — nursing, psychologists, banking, accounting, farming and more)

Knowing this skillset will be needed in a few years, can we make an effort to solve tech’s diversity issue by encouraging women and minorities from other fields to be the ones who start learning how to bridge the gap?

This skillset and talent will still be needed and will develop but it may not be as diverse as we would like it to be.

This is also important for AI’s own progress. Today AI is still in its early stages, for most fields. In 5–10 years, for AI’s own growth, we will need domain experts deeply embedded as part of the AI technology teams, driving the product design, requirements and roadmap. Today we see a lot of fear about AI going rogue and a large part of it can be mitigated by pulling in the domain experts to make sure all the checks and balances are in place to prevent such worst-case scenarios. At the end of the day, AI can learn but we still need the human experts to teach it.

We need to start the conversation: To understand people’s fears, AI’s impact on people’s jobs, their livelihood, their kids’ futures, and ultimately, their purpose. We want honest discussion — the fears, the opportunities, the impediments and the changes that need to happen. It needs to start TODAY.

We believe, through honest conversation, education, and inclusion we can enable the workforce of the future, which will be AI-savvy and also have a unique opportunity to make the future workforce as diverse as the real world.

Note: Opinions are my own and not related to any of the organizations or institutions that I am or have been associated with.

We are still so far from solving that challenge and we need all the help we can get as we start building out this community of AI expert minds and AI-curious (scared/worried/fearful) minds to start empowering ourselves to shape and build out AI that truly helps humans reach new heights of happiness and success. Lets build AI together in a way that it will make us all better humans.

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