Responsible AI Economics with Katya Klinova & The Partnership on AI

In recent years, the focus of AI developers has been to implement technologies that replace basic human labor. Talking to us today about why this is the wrong application for AI (right now), is Katya Klinova, the Head of AI, Labor, and the Economy at The Partnership on AI. Tune in to find out why replacing human labor doesn't benefit the whole of humanity, and what our focus should be instead. We delve into the threat of "so-so technologies" and what the developer's role should be in approaching ethical vendors and looking after the workers supplying them with data. Join us to find out more about how AI can be used to better the whole of society if there’s a shift in the field’s current aims.

Key Points From This Episode:

• An introduction to Katya Klinova, Head of Al, Labor and the Economy at The Partnership on AI.
• How her expectations of the world after her undergraduate degree shaped her.
• Pursuing a degree in economics to understand how AI impacts labor and economics.
• The role of The Partnership on AI in dissipating technological gains.
• Who is impacted when AI is introduced to a market: the consumers and the workers.
• How different companies are deficient in the ways they benefit everyone.
• Find out what the “threat of so-so technology” is.
• Should people become shareholders in AI technology that they helped to train?
• How capitalism incentivizes “so-so technologies”.
• The role of developers in selecting vendors and responsible sourcing.
• Why it's important to realize that data labelers are employees and not just numbers.
• Shifting the focus of AI from automation to complementarity.
• Why now is not the time to be replacing human labor.

Tweetables:

“Creating AI that benefits all is actually a very large commitment and a statement, and I don't think many companies have really realized or thought through what they're actually saying in the economic terms when they're subscribing to something like that.” — @klinovakatya [0:09:45]

"It’s not that you want to avoid all kinds of automation, no matter what. Automation, at the end of the day, has been the force that lifted living conditions and incomes around the world, and has been around for much longer than AI." — @klinovakatya [0:11:28]

“We compensate people for the task or for their time, but we are not necessarily compensating them for the data that they generate that we use to train models that can displace their jobs in the future.” — @klinovakatya [0:14:49]

"Might we be automating too much for the kind of labor market needs that we have right now?" — @klinovakatya [0:23:14]

”It’s not the time to eliminate all of the jobs that we possibly can. It’s not the time to create machines that can match humans in everything that they do, but that’s what we are doing.” — @klinovakatya [0:24:50]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Katya Klinova on LinkedIn

"Automation and New Tasks: How Technology Displaces and Reinstates Labor"

The Partnership on AI: Responsible Sourcing