Artificial intelligence is here, and it’s evolving quickly.
A roster of big-name presenters at a recent conference on artificial intelligence agree that transformative changes are afoot, with industry-disrupting uses and profound implications that are just beginning.
“This is an inflection point,” said Professor Michael Luca, founder and director of the Technology and Society Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, a research and education center focused on helping society capture the benefits of emerging technologies while reducing their risks.
For the institute’s first major event, the Leading with AI: Building Trust and Powering Growth conference, held May 28-29 at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. Luca brought together experts in business, economics, law, and healthcare to discuss AI use, now and in the future.
“There’s a lot of exciting technology, but what is it going to mean for labor markets, for innovation, for skill development?” Luca asked. “How do we put guardrails in place to make sure AI is having a positive impact? My hope is we’re providing opportunities to have those discussions.”
Stop signs and traffic lights
Though it may seem as though AI is suddenly everywhere, many presenters noted that adoption is still minimal, with many jobseekers and workers actively avoiding it.
“It is almost certainly true that people will lose jobs to AI, but don’t say the sky is falling before it actually falls,” said Martha Gimbel, executive director and co-founder of the Budget Lab at Yale University.
Jonathan Kanter, former assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice and now a Carnegie Mellon professor, likened the moment to when cars were invented, but there weren’t yet stop signs or traffic lights to guide them, or enough roads for adequate use.
“We have a lot of horse and buggy companies that are figuring out how to incorporate engines,” he said. “We’ll really see the impact when we see companies that are built for AI, not retrofitted.”
Tom Barkin, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, said AI is top of mind as he assesses the economy, but warned against making predictions about how it will actually be used.
“It still feels narrow,” he said. “There is a lot of experimentation and what I call ‘AI as a really good search engine.’” He expects the eventual uses to be surprising.
So far, he’s seeing the greatest adoption for coding and call centers, as well as collection centers. “It turns out that if you want to collect overdue debts you really want to reach people at dinnertime, and an automated caller can call everyone at 6 p.m.,” he said.
Duncan Gilchrist, a co-founder of Delphina, a company that helps companies use AI to solve their problems, led the rideshare pricing system at Uber, and noted that few would have predicted that technology would disrupt an industry as seemingly analog as taxis.
He was one of several presenters encouraging organizations to experiment with AI to learn how it’s most useful for that company or individual, while acknowledging the risks involved in relying on it.
“AI is imperfect, it will make mistakes,” Gilchrist said. “Companies need confidence to embrace that imperfection and know where they can and can’t tolerate errors. They need the lens of asking what’s the cost of being wrong.”
Mission critical
As a Stanford professor and AI entrepreneur, Michael Ostrovsky interacts with people who are uniquely eager to embrace the technology.
Some businesses are experimenting with running AI all the time, so that every employee conversation, email and action is recorded, said Ostrovsky, the Fred H. Merrill Professor of Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and co-founder of Topsort, a company that uses AI to help brands boost ad performance.
“If you’re a CFO and preparing a quarterly report, you still need to check it,” he said. “But if you want a quick glance at how a particular department is doing, most of the time it’s actually enough. It speeds things up a tremendous amount, and you realize most decisions are not irreversible. Even if it’s mission critical, you can still ask AI to do part of the work.”
Adam Jaffe, Fred C. Hecht Professor in Economics at Brandeis University, expects AI to invent things, with implications for how those inventions will be patented. Thinking of AI as a tool that humans can use “is already either a fuzzy distinction or an outright fiction and will probably become more so as AI becomes more powerful,” he said.
The future of jobs
One big topic at the conference was the future of jobs. Several presenters thought recent graduates would probably fare better than mid-career employees.
Tinglong Dai, the Bernard T. Ferrari Professor of Business at Carey, led a discussion about the reskilling of workers, with professors Jorge Tamayo, principal investigator of the Digital Reskilling Lab of the Harvard Business School, Hamsa Bastani of the Wharton School of Business, and Jayashankar Swaminathan of the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School.
For highly skilled people, AI can be a productivity multiplier, said Bastani, adding that one concern is ensuring that organizations keep the systems and mentors that confer expertise. “We want AI collaboration,” she said. “We want humans to still have value, so people will hire them and they have a role to play in society.”
People don’t like change, said Swaminathan, but people just starting their careers will be most motivated to learn how to use AI. The role of the more senior people is not to learn how to use AI, but to provide the knowledge and expertise, he said.
“The biggest positive is we’re going to find a lot of the drudgery; these things could be automated. Maybe AI and humans will dance together, beautifully.”
Leading with AI was presented by the Technology and Society Initiative and Johns Hopkins Carey Business School with support from the National Association for Business Economics.
