【The Pursuit of Lust】

Elon Musk recently said that the threat of Artificial Intelligence is The Pursuit of Lustmore dangerous than that of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

While I don’t pretend to be a foreign policy expert, I’m confident that Musk’s commentary oversimplifies things at the very least. And that AI, when defined, built, cultivated and deployed with the right human oversight, has the potential to do significantly more good for the world than harm.

In order to ensure Musk’s comments stay in the realm of extreme, though, the AI-focused technology community needs to collectively figure out some basic guide rails.

Understand ethical AI and its role in the future of work

A crucial step toward building a secure and thriving AI industry is collectively defining what ethical AI means for people developing the technology – and people using it.

At Sage, we define ethical AI as the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like humans, built with the ability to autonomously conduct, support or manage business activity across disciplines in a responsible and accountable way.

At its core, AI is the creation of intelligent machines that think, work and learn like humans. AI should not be a replacement for standard business rules or procedures.

That’s why we believe all AI-driven technology used in the workplace should embody and advance the interests of an individual company, its staff and its consumer base.

Recruit talent that understands AI – and its power to address workplace challenges

Companies deal with team changes regularly. Issues arise tied to trust, accountability and personnel behavior that goes against the values of a company – or society, in general. In the tech industry alone, sexism, racial bias and other serious, but eradicable trends persist from the C-suite down to the entry-level.

Consequently, the industry should focus on efforts to develop and grow a diverse talent pool that can build AI technologies to enhance business operations and address specific sets of workplace issues, while ensuring that it is accountable.

Employers need to recruit people who understand the importance of applying strict human resources guidelines to AI performing tasks alongside human employees across industries and geographies. AI, for its part, needs to learn how to conduct itself in a work environment and be rewarded for expected behavior to reinforce good habits.

Hopefully, AI’s human co-workers – including people actually building the technology – will learn vital AI management skills, adopt strong ethics and hold themselves more accountable in the process.

Develop AI that runs on data reflecting the diversity of its users

Humans possess inherent social, economic and cultural biases. It’s unfortunately core to social fabrics around the world. Therefore, AI offers a chance for the business community to eliminate such biases from their global operations.

The onus is on the tech community to build technology that utilizes data from relevant, trusted sources to embrace a diversity of culture, knowledge, opinions, skills and interactions.

Indeed, AI operating in the business world today performs repetitive tasks well, learns on the job and even incorporates human social norms into its work. However, AI also spends a significant amount of time scouring the web and its own conversational history for additional context that will inform future interactions with human counterparts.

This prevalence of well-trodden data sets and partial information on the internet presents a challenge and an opportunity for AI developers. When built with responsible business and social practices in mind, AI technology has the potential to consistently – and ethically – deliver products and services to people who need them. And do so without the omnipresent human threat of bias.

Ultimately, we need to create innately diverse AI. As an industry-focused tech community, we must develop effective mechanisms to filter out biases, as well as any negative sentiment in the data that AI learns from to ensure the technology does not perpetuate stereotypes. Unless we build AI using diverse teams, datasets and design, we risk repeating the fundamental inequality of previous industrial revolutions.

Through it all, it’s important to remember that the respective roles of humans and ethics in AI development is crucial. In fact, I think the shared future of AI and humans depends on them.

Kriti Sharma is the vice president of bots and AI at Sage Group, a global integrated accounting, payroll and payment systems provider. She is also the creator of Pegg, the world’s first AI assistant for accounting, with users in 135 countries.