Gov. Gavin Newsom is urging Stanford researchers at the new Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence to stay true to their name and focus on the impact AI is having on people’s jobs.
Newsom and Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates keynoted a symposium yesterday where university officials and scientists announced the formal launch of the institute. Its goal is to address both the peril and promise of AI, with human ethics and values as its lodestar.
Newsom said he was recently at the Port of Long Beach, talking with longshoremen worried that upgrades coming to the port will cost them jobs. He said longshoremen asked him not to implement the upgrades.
‘We’re moving forward–low-carbon green growth goals which are the envy of the rest of the nation,” Newsom said. “Our cap-and-trade program, our goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and that means we’re moving forward with new technologies that are more efficient. The problem with the new technologies that are more efficient–you don’t need any people.’
In recent years, AI has managed to tangle itself in a pile of ethical problems. Facial recognition software doesn’t see faces that aren’t white. Speech recognition wants you to speak the King’s English. Or at least a solid American version of it–no accents. Longshoremen aren’t the only workers fearing job loss; truckers and restaurant workers also feel the hot breath of AI at their backs. And we can’t leave out Russian bots serving up lies to mess with our democracy.
“As technologists, it’s our responsibility to address the failings of our tools,” said Stanford HAI co-director Fei-Fei Li. “But it’s also our responsibility to realize the full extent of their potential.”
For example, she said, what if AI could keep an eye on patients in an emergency room, and alert staff when someone’s condition worsens? Or what if AI could help figure out how children learn, and improve education?
The new institute’s research will focus on enhancing and augmenting human lives across medicine, education and other fields, without replacing humans. KQED’s Brian Watt spoke about the new institute with two of its associate directors, computer science professor James Landay and political science professor Rob Reich. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Some key points from the interview …
What exactly is AI?
Landay: It’s a fuzzy term, and the definition has moved over the years. I’d say the simplest definition is: the capability of machines to imitate intelligent human behavior.
But that behavior could be as simple as Google Maps telling you which ways to get to work today because there’s different traffic, all the way to maybe making a diagnosis about some very complex cancer situation.
What is the one thing people get wrong about AI?
Landay: Thinking that it’s going to be this hyper-intelligent being that will be so much smarter than people, and therefore eventually take over the world like in some kind of “Terminator” movie. That’s really the biggest misconception we see.
Another thing we hear a lot is that AI will make millions of jobs obsolete. Should we be worried?
Landay: I think job disruption is always a thing to be worried about. Globalization led to some major structural problems for some people and created wealth for others. It’s this unevenness that occurs with these disruptions that we need to pay attention to, and get ahead of, to make sure the people who might be disrupted are learning new skills, so they have a future.
Now, some economists think AI might not even disrupt us, because the real problem over the long period is a lack of growth in the population — that there won’t be enough younger people to support all the older people. And that we may even need machines to help us move forward as a society in health care and other areas.
So it’s not even clear, in an economic sense, that AI will replace everyone’s jobs.