This year’s AI Ethics, Policy, and Governance event brought together more than 900 people from academia, industry, and government to discuss the future of AI (or automated computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence).
Discussions at the conference highlighted how companies, governments, and people around the world are grappling with AI’s ethical, policy, and governance implications.
In this panel, Expanding Human Experience, Susan Athey, the Economics of Technology Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business and faculty associate director at Stanford HAI, spoke about AI’s impact on the economy. It’s critical, she said, that AI creates shared prosperity and expands — rather than replaces — the human experience in life and at work. Humans, after all, understand things in a way that may be difficult to codify in AI. How we organize and think about the future of work for people as well as machines is important, as it is all interconnected, she added.
Erik Brynjolfsson (pictured with Athey), director of the Initiative on the Digital Economy at MIT, said companies building AI need to focus on the human side in addition to the eye-popping technology. “We need to understand first what our values are so we can understand how best to use these technologies.” He said it’s necessary to rethink the whole organizational and business process in terms of how AI fits in with the human culture.
Other panelists discussed the roles of public entities and private enterprise when it comes to regulating AI.
Watch all of the first-day sessions and learn more about the event in this blog.