Can humans remain in control of AI?
The coming wave of AI won't just be tools, but emotionally intelligent decision-makers ready to wield some autonomous power of their own
I have a special affinity for emerging tech. As a journalist, I’ve been covering it for years— first from Silicon Valley, while attending Stanford University on a journalism fellowship, and then later globally, as a Southeast Asia correspondent and technology strategies editor specializing in how digital voices/crowds interact with traditional power.
Today, as co-founder of #NewRules Media and as a media professor at Columbia University, tech’s influence on society remains deeply critical to track. Much of my academic research and many of the global workshops I’ve been leading these days on change management have been grounded in the exploration of the many ways technology is altering power, and reshaping our relationships with our institutions, and with each other—personally, politically, at work and at play.
This isn’t another article about ChatGPT [though Bradley and I are having fun using generative AI to co-create some of the illustrations for this newsletter].
It is, instead, about the powerful new wave of AI systems emerging—and set to start rolling out later this year and next. Unlike ChatGPT, these new systems will be far more formidable. They’ll be emotionally intelligent, capable of making consequential decisions and designed to start wielding some unsupervised power of their own. [Called autosapiens by early developers, the “auto” refers to their ability to learn from experience and operate without constant human supervision. The reference to “sapiens” underscores their ability to make complex judgments in context, and sometimes better than humans.]
The big question now on everybody’s mind is, will humans be able to control these new actors?
Creating a New Model
Mustafa Suleyman, founder of the start-up Inflection AI, which recently raised $1.3 billion, is the creator of Pi, an acronym for one of these next-generation systems that stands for personal intelligence. At a recent AI conference I attended in New York, Mustafa described the EQ he and his teams have been developing for Pi and emphasized the benefits for healthcare. “We’re specifically conditioning Pi to be good at emotional intelligence,” he said. “It’s a great listener. It’s very even-handed. It presents both sides of an argument. It asks you great questions. It tries to remember what you’ve said in the past. It will often paraphrase what you’ve said in order to make you feel heard.
“…Not all of us have a supportive parent, or husband, or wife, or child, or friend to get us through difficult times,” he added. “This will be incredibly valuable to millions and millions of people” and a powerful antidote for loneliness.
But not everyone is so wholly excited. A lot of companies still don’t fully understand AI—nor are prepared yet to manage the changes.
Henry Timms, the former President and CEO of Lincoln Center and a visiting fellow at the Said Business School at the University of Oxford, recently warned in the Harvard Business Review that these advanced AI systems will have benefits but also “will be likely to play a significant role in deciding everything from who goes to prison to who will get healthcare to how we wage war.” It is therefore critical, he says, to start figuring out how to live and work with these systems and how to start designing ways to manage them—and in a way that balances power rather than cedes much of it to the technology platforms which captured our data and attention during the last big wave of tech change catalyzed by social media.
“We are at the dawn of another major shift in how power works,” wrote Henry, the author of New Power, “…and we have a chance, if we act soon and are clear-eyed, to do things differently.”
New Rules for Change
In a recent but informal survey I conducted as part of a Berlin-based book project on digital transformation and post-pandemic leadership, the majority of global business, tech, nonprofit and healthcare leaders polled said this new age of AI will require leaders to consider these autosapiens as coworkers, not tools, and to mitigate and measure their impact on internal culture. They also said it would be critically important for company leadership to review and adjust the practices and policies of the way they will be using AI, so as to ensure system accountability and their knowledge of negative influence.
Other suggestions included ways to mitigate AI’s potential impact on the humans in the workplace. One British executive suggested putting a premium on human interaction, to clarify the supremacy of humans now and going forward.
All responded that it’s time to start creating new management strategies to accommodate the shift. For many companies, the service benefits and new profit potential of having these new AI actors in the mix might well outweigh some of the risks.
Mustafa agrees. “Take health care, for example,” he says. “These new AI models can detect diseases far more quickly in hundreds of new ways—on radiology scans, chest Xrays, mammograms, scans to detect acute kidney injury, to help detect glaucoma and blinding eye diseases —and all at the cost of producing a world class diagnosis and proposed treatment pathway that is about to plummet to zero marginal cost. It is going to be essentially free. And we’re going to see the same kind of benefit trajectory in education, in decision-making and innovation across the board.”
The pressure is growing for organizations and entire business sectors to start designing new leadership and management models and strategies to enable working in tandem with these new AI actors, and to ensure human and organizational oversight to effectively manage their output and cultural impact on the workplace.
Says Henry: “The future of these technologies is far too important to be left to the technologists, alone. To match the power of autosapient systems and their owners, we will need an unprecedented alliance of policymakers, corporate leaders, activists and consumers … to have the clarity and confidence to lead and not be led” to keep human power sustainable.
Keep leading, folks. The future is now.
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