Future Here Now: AI's inclusion benefits- and problems.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-ways-artificial-intelligence-empowering-people/
We’ve become accustomed to hearing in the general press about the risks of Artificial Intelligence - the whispers that it’s going to take your job, control your brain, etc. But as this article very nicely demonstrates, AI is also one of the technologies that can release members of our communities who have been locked out of economically productive life, and often social and cultural presence, by physical disabilities and neurological variances. Like motorized wheelchairs and Braille and speech synthesis, technologies can make all the difference for a person the conventional world was not designed to address.
This is being treated as a footnote to the sky-is-falling-doomsday language that too often surrounds these tools that right now live at sort of the edge of our understanding of how they work, kind of like a combustion engine for our great-grandparents. But it may actually be the single most profound way in which AI helps create the Fusion Era.
One of the elements that seems to pervade the businesses and movements and cultures that live on the leading edge of this epochal transition is that the value that any one person contributes to that larger effort, economical or other, depends directly on their ability to independently problem solve - and even more importantly, to work with others to create something new (product, organization system, whatever). We know this, but it bears repeating: human creativity is necessary to make new stuff. Even the most sophisticated AI technologies can only draw from things that people have already created. It can’t make anything new, it can only do mash-ups. And while mash-ups can be interesting, they’re not making something new.
But new is hard. Hard work. Hard thinking work.
Especially when you’ve been doing the thing for a long time. We get stuck in our assumptions and our experience, and it gets harder and harder to see the thing with fresh eyes. It feels like you’re stuck in a box, and you know you’re in a box, and you want to get out of the box, but you can’t find the trap door.
That is why it is so centrally, so crucially important, that we develop and deploy the tools that bring the people who have been historically left out into whatever we are trying to create. It’s not just a matter of fairness or justice, although those are important reasons in their own right.
In addition to those - and this is the really powerful change unfolding now that has not been a factor in inclusion before - people who were historically left out now have a unique and valuable advantage.
They can bring a perspective that the heirs apparent can’t: a newer one. An outside one. A fresh one.
So tools that help people who have been left out participate in social and cultural and economic life aren’t just important for the people that they directly assist.
They’re crucial for all of us.