RIYADH: Inserting human values into AI to ensure that the job market achieved a balance between the need for automation and the need for human input was vital, experts at the Global AI Summit in Riyadh said on Wednesday.
During a panel discussion, titled “Job Disruption: Is it All Lost?,” Ray Wang, chairman and CEO of Constellation Research Inc, addressed this concern.
“We have to … make sure that we actually continue to operate at a machine-level scale and at a human scale, bringing those two areas together,” he said.
“When we think about the Internet age, it was open, it was decentralized — things were cheaper, we had a lot of players. This is closed, this is centralized. This is more expensive, and only a few will win … We have to work double as hard to make sure that jobs are going to be there.”
Wang said that jobs would not be “all lost” if the industry ensured a balance between the jobs that were replaced and the jobs that were created.
He said that it was the education system’s responsibility to teach children the right sets of skills t0 prepare them for future positions.
Mohamed Elhoseiny, associate professor of computer science at KAUST, echoed Wang’s view. He added that AI models needed to be developed to complement schooling rather than misusing AI to plagiarize work.
Elhoseiny also spoke about the importance of inserting human goals into AI designs and emphasized that humans were more powerful when working with AI than alone.
“A big problem right now in our schools is kids can use ChatGPT, for example, to solve problems. But this does not contribute to the very goal of developing the skills of the children, so how can we … help children do more and gain the skillsets, and how do we do that in away that aligns with our (human) goals,” he said.
Nancy Giordano, author and founder of Play Big Inc., wants to embrace the new job market that will be created hand-in-hand with AI.
“Are we trying to hold on to jobs so that we can protect an economic system that we may have outgrown?” she said.
But for that future model to succeed, there was a need rethink the approach to AI application, she said.
“How do we prepare economically for that kind of world?” Giordano asked. “We have not built the scaffolding for this new era that we’re heading into.”
Wang said that the PESTLE model, a framework that analyzes external factors within political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental factors, was “perfect for the scaffolding” of AI.
“And now is the time to actually do that,” he said.
