The Human Side of AI - Leadership and Legislation

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March 2024

Hi Paul

Welcome to The Cirrostratus Group March newsletter.

There is no question that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have a substantial impact on all of us going forward. Increasingly companies that have AI capabilities in their products have developed a broader view of their responsibilities to do right by the humans using their product. In parallel government legislation has been and continues to be developed that will guide what is allowed to be developed and sold.

As outlined in the HBR article referenced below it is no longer sufficient to develop products with only traditional measures of usefulness such as speed, accuracy and scalability. Products will also be measured on human values such as safety, fairness, harmlessness and dignity. Whether this is driven by the leadership of companies, the humans using the systems, government regulation or a combination of these is unclear but there is progress on all of these fronts.

Paul Ressler

The Cirrostratus Group

Human Values as an AI Product Differentiator

The Harvard Business Review article on how to bring human values into an AI system is both a good overview of what that means and also some steps on how to accomplish it.

Human values means things like safety, dignity, fairness, meritocracy, avoiding harm and helpfulness may be included as product attributes in addition to the normal product attributes. These values are subject to the normal product planning thinking where they depend on market segments and time to market. Trade-offs as mentioned below are key.

Some of the steps involved in incorporating human values into your AI product include:

Define values for your product
Assess the tradeoffs
Align partners values
Design the values into the product
Human feedback

There is an interview with Sam Altman of OpenAI referenced in this article, specifically the In Good Company podcast. It is an excellent interview on a variety of OpenAI and general AI topics.

AI Legislation

The EU is farther along with their AI legislaton than the US. The AI Act has been approved by the European Parliament and will be in force starting in May 2024. Companies will have 3 years to comply but predictions say that people will start feeling an impact by the end of 2024. This MIT Technology review article has a brief, good summary of the main areas of the law including:

Some uses of AI will be banned
It will be clearer when someone is using a system with AI capability
Citizens can make complaints to the government when they believe they have been harmed by AI
AI companies will need to be more transparent about their models

This article has a summary of the US Federal legislation that is in process. Some of the areas of focus include:

Horizontal applications
Human Resources technology
Platform safety
Generative AI

Generative AI seems to be the area where there is the most activity.

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