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CITYAM.COM<br />
TUESDAY 4 APRIL 2017<br />
FEATURE<br />
27<br />
OFFICE POLITICS<br />
Is your<br />
workplace AI<br />
ethical, or<br />
even useful?<br />
Kriti Sharma says it’s no good having a<br />
bot that only recognises male voices<br />
THE ARTIFICIAL intelligence –<br />
or AI – revolution is already<br />
well underway. While it feels<br />
like almost every week<br />
another report comes out<br />
speculating about an imagined,<br />
doomed future of robots stealing our<br />
jobs, artificial intelligence and chatbot<br />
technology is already seamlessly<br />
integrated into our daily lives without<br />
us even noticing.<br />
Every time you ask Siri where the<br />
nearest post office is or ask Alexa to play<br />
Ed Sheeran’s Divide on loop, every time<br />
your iPhone suggests your next word to<br />
text and Google predicts your search,<br />
this tech is motoring away in the background,<br />
making hundreds of processes<br />
around you quicker and easier.<br />
So what does AI mean for the future<br />
of our workplaces? Everything – if we<br />
use it right.<br />
Given that the AI market is forecast to<br />
grow from $643.7m in 2016 to $36.8bn<br />
by 2025, companies are desperate to<br />
make the most of the technology. It is<br />
already unlocking the newly productive,<br />
efficient and hassle-free<br />
workplaces of the future, and has the<br />
potential to do so much more, if we harness<br />
it in the right way. Here are three<br />
fundamental questions we should ask<br />
about any AI before we create or deploy<br />
it.<br />
1. Is it actually useful?<br />
With companies like Spotify, Facebook<br />
and Google investing huge amounts in<br />
bot development and even appointing<br />
senior AI executives, it’s fair to say that<br />
bots and AI have firmly entered the<br />
mainstream, and it seems like every<br />
AI can do admin<br />
tasks for us. But<br />
have we thought<br />
enough about the<br />
legal and ethical<br />
impacts of it?<br />
brand is trying to get in on the action.<br />
This is all well and good, but we must<br />
make sure we are channelling this technology<br />
to solve actual problems. AI<br />
could transform offices by handling our<br />
mundane admin tasks so we can focus<br />
our energy on more rewarding work. A<br />
Harvard Business Review survey from<br />
late last year found that managers<br />
across all levels spend more than half<br />
their time on administrative tasks,<br />
from juggling illness and flexible working<br />
requests, to making sure data entry<br />
and reports are consistent in standard –<br />
all things machines could take over.<br />
2. Where is the data behind it coming<br />
from?<br />
AI is only as good as the data that we<br />
feed it. We all saw what happened to<br />
Microsoft’s Twitter chatbot Tay – the<br />
RUN LIKE THE<br />
WIND<br />
Zombies, Run!<br />
Free<br />
Stick your<br />
headphones in,<br />
start running<br />
and this app will<br />
transport you to<br />
some<br />
alternative<br />
horror where<br />
you’re being<br />
chased by<br />
zombies. Each<br />
“immersive<br />
audio drama”<br />
puts you “at the<br />
centre of your<br />
own zombie<br />
adventure<br />
story”. The<br />
realism of the<br />
terror will get<br />
you fighting fit.<br />
It sounds bizarre<br />
but it works –<br />
several<br />
members of the<br />
City A.M. team<br />
have been<br />
transformed.<br />
classic artificial intelligence horror<br />
story of the robot who, fuelled by the<br />
online trolls whose language it fed on,<br />
turned into a racist bigot.<br />
We have the opportunity to create this<br />
new world without any of the biases –<br />
racial, gender, or otherwise – that exist<br />
in the real world. It’s our responsibility<br />
to invest time and capital in careful consideration<br />
of the ethical, legal and societal<br />
impacts of this new technology.<br />
Leading thinkers and AI developers are<br />
urging the government to ensure ethical<br />
codes are adhered to, to avoid reinforcing<br />
existing societal bias.<br />
3. Was it built by a diverse team?<br />
The best way to avoid bias, of course, is<br />
to ensure that a diverse team is building<br />
this technology in the first place – not<br />
always an easy thing to do in the<br />
famously male-dominated tech industry,<br />
but one that we must be constantly<br />
committed to.<br />
Technology falls short when it is not<br />
built inclusively – the first voice-activated<br />
software didn’t recognise female<br />
voices because it was only tested on its<br />
all-male programming team, and early<br />
cameras favoured picking up white skin<br />
tones over non-white ones.<br />
The fourth industrial revolution is<br />
already here, and its potential to transform<br />
our workplaces – and our world –<br />
is limitless. But we owe it to the future<br />
generations who will be using this tech<br />
to do it right.<br />
£ Kriti Sharma is vice president of bots and<br />
AI at Sage, inventor of Pegg, the world’s<br />
first accounting chatbot, and was recently<br />
named in Forbes’ 30 Under 30. You can<br />
hear her discuss the future of AI at Sage<br />
Summit UK on 5-6 April.
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