How tech will drive AI’s growth by solving for human values
Artificial intelligence has the potential to change every aspect of how people live. The question is whether those changes are helpful or harmful. What, if anything, should we do now to maximize AI’s benefits and reduce its risks? Nicole Alexander has been tackling these questions as global head of marketing at Meta and as a professor of marketing and technology at New York University. She believes that making smart decisions about AI now could make its potential better for all of us in the future.
Kate MacArthur: How can AI improve society?
Nicole Alexander: If you think about the past 10 years, we didn’t have facial-recognition applications, which afford efficiency. We didn’t have smart homes. Think of things like personal shopping or streaming apps. There are so many improvements to our day-to-day lives based on AI and the convenience that it affords, not to even talk about the advancements in biotech and medicines to help everything from Alzheimer’s disease to the future of cancer research. Because AI seeps into society in such a fast and under-the-radar way, it changes our expectations where we don’t necessarily think of it as AI, we just think of it as the net new.
MacArthur: I would probably be much healthier if I didn’t have to meal plan and shop and think about what I need in my pantry. Could I get there with AI?
Alexander: There can be an entire understanding of not just what you want to consume, but is what you want to consume the right diet for you? We track things like our heart rate, our blood pressure, all this preemptive information. Then AI feeds them into other areas such as convenience, preventative measures as granular as where you live, if you have preexisting conditions, etc. Having systems in place that can collect massive data more than you and I could ever do manually, and then make recommendations on how to optimize your life provides not only convenience but also longevity and healthiness.
MacArthur: Is there anybody whose life won’t be affected by AI?
Alexander: AI’s impact on society underscores the critical need for accuracy and transparency in its development, deployment and usage. As AI systems become increasingly integrated into various aspects of our lives, it is essential to prioritize these two principles to mitigate potential risks and ensure positive outcomes.
“It’s the transparency not of the AI, but the transparency of how the AI was applied.”
MacArthur: How can you make people know that they’re being affected by AI?
Alexander: It’s so hard to show all the areas that AI affects. So, there’s a level when transparency is needed versus when it isn’t needed. You don’t need to know about the logistics of transportation models in Chicago, for instance. We just know that it’s working. If I got declined from a bank loan, [the bank] should say, “We have a system that looks at these 17 factors. This is where you score negatively and positively across these factors and your total score, with two points shy of being able to qualify for said loan.” That gives me transparency. It’s the transparency not of the AI, but the transparency of how the AI was applied.
MacArthur: How could AI be used positively for something like loneliness?
Alexander: If we can get AI to contextualize, to decipher what human emotions are and what appropriate responses are to those human emotions from a data set, then we get closer to answering the question, “How does AI provide the level of trillions of responses and subtleties around an emotional need?” But the level of advancement in the myriad responses that would need to be developed, we’re not there yet unfortunately.
MacArthur: We’ve already seen AI care companions like ElliQ which we featured in our Aging issue, be used for elderly communities.
Alexander: If we think about real comfort for those that are lonely, they are in elderly communities. Those are the areas where we really see a huge benefit and will immediately benefit those that are most in need. And it’s not necessarily a robot. It could be an app that hopefully helps anxiety or is helpful if someone has ongoing depression.
MacArthur: How does AI affect humanity and at what point are we messing with that?
Alexander: We’ve already started. AI, if it’s used well, is a time capsule that can give multiple perspectives and dimensions of how people felt at any given point in time. But if manipulated, you can eliminate an entire society, race or culture of individuals in their history. We have to be very careful when we think about how much we rely, leverage, and become the subjects of AI as we move forward with much more advanced and massive models that will affect everyone.
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