Why ethics matter in Artificial intelligence (AI)

Rapid Rise of Artificial intelligence (AI)

The world has seen rapid rise in applications of artificial intelligence (AI) over the past two years.The potential of AI to disrupt the world is so high that there is already a debate around the world about AI vs Humans or AI taking over the human jobs.
If Big Data is seen as the oil that fuels the digital economy, Artificial intelligence is the automobile that transport companies from the old largely physical asset based model to the new information based world where competitive advantage lies with those companies who are able to squeeze maximum value out of their data in the least amount of time.
Companies trying to evade digital disruption will need to leverage AI or else they will be disrupted by new age technology companies who are already monopolizing the digital space.
AI is not only about technology, it is about creating value for business and society.This implies that employees and managers should find AI approachable and not consider it as an enemy.At the same time, companies should define the ethical and moral boundaries of AI.

Unraveling Artificial intelligence (AI)

• All people resist change.In case of AI, people will resist even more because they find AI intimidating. This can act as a barrier for AI adoption especially among older managers.
• Managers who are intimidated by AI may want to buy their way out of having to work with it directly. This is a wrong approach.
• The best ways is to confront AI head on.This can be done by encouraging people to learn about AI, doing some basic coding on AI to develop use cases that can be applied in day to day life.Once people learn more about AI and its applications, there are more chances of people being friendly towards it.This can encourage people to learn more about AI, some people can even establish their own startups.

Determining use cases for Artificial intelligence (AI)

• Leaders need to decide where to apply AI driven solutions in their business.Before undertaking an expensive change initiative, businesses can conduct trials on AI in order to guage its chances of success.
• One of the best use cases for AI that can complement human intelligence is to identify patterns.The capability of AI to spot and exploit patterns amid a vast dataset is invaluable.
• Apart from this, there are many tasks where a combination of humans and AI can outperform.A smart human and smart machine can independently make predictions.AI can be useful where a marginal increase in accuracy produces disproportionately large benefits.In order to derive this benefit, it is important that a clean reliable data is available.
• Availability of clean and reliable data is an huge challenge because companies have lots of data but not at one place.Hence quality of the data available needs to be checked before it is integrated.This is a huge nightmare.

Ethical Artificial intelligence (AI)

• At the end of the day, AI is only a technology, a tool created to serve human needs.The ethical and moral issues in AI arise when large scale automation displaces thousands of human jobs, when data invades customer’s personal privacy and when pre-existing biases and inequality are baked into algorithms.
• The responsible AI model should ensure that humans are at the centre, adheres to regulatory compliance and is designed ethically. When AI data breaches individual’s personal privacy, then it can affect consumer’s psychological wellbeing which will ultimately hurt company’s bottomline.Customers would not want their autonomy to be compromised and would not want AI to predict their personal behavior.
• It is tempting for companies to use all customers data at their disposal in order to make their offerings more attractive to their customers.This is because companies think it would increase their profitability.For instance, Facebook delivers targeted ads to customers based on their user profiles and behavior. Such targeted ads improve sales and increases revenues.
• At the same time Facebook is fined by regulators for breaching customer privacy.In 2016, it gave access of its users data to Cambridge Analytica – A political consulting firm to create targeted ads that may have helped swing the 2016 US presidential elections in favour of Donald Trump.

Conclusion

• Artificial intelligence (AI) ownership is more than achieving technological competencies – It is an organizational challenge.
• Companies leveraging AI in their business models can maximize profits in the long run by positioning themselves as ethical in how they apply AI in their businesses.