AI and Design Human Centric Approach & Perspective Geetika Kambli

Speaker: Geetika Kambli, Managing Partner, Future Factory
Moderator: Sameer Dhanrajani, CEO & Co-founder, AIQRATE Advisory & Consulting
Thursday, September 3rd 2020

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE has emerged as a signature theme of our time, set to reshape business and society. The excitement is warranted, but so are concerns. At a business level, large AI projects often fail to deliver. Many of the culprits are familiar and persistent: forcing technological square pegs into strategic round holes, overestimating the sufficiency of available data or underestimating the difficulty of wrangling it into usable shape, taking insufficient steps to ensure that algorithmic outputs result in the desired business outcomes. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that AI algorithms embedded in ubiquitous exponential technology can encode societal biases, spread conspiracies and promulgate fake news, amplify echo chambers of public opinion, hijack our attention, and even impair our mental well-being. Effectively addressing such issues requires a realistic conception of AI, which is too often hyped as emerging “artificial minds” on an exponential path to generally out-thinking humans. In reality, today’s AI applications result from the same classes of algorithms that have been under development for decades but implemented on considerably more powerful computers and trained on larger data sets. They are “smart” in narrow senses, not in the general way humans are smart.

Human-centered design is also crucial. AI applications must reflect realistic conceptions of user needs and human psychology. Paraphrasing the user-centered design pioneer Don Norman, AI needs to “accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.” This session dwells on the concept that smart technologies are unlikely to engender smart outcomes unless they are designed to promote smart adoption on the part of human end users. AI & Design: Human Centric Approach & Perspective ….