On November 7th, Kathy Baxter, Architect of Ethical AI Practice at Salesforce, joined me at AnswerLab’s San Francisco office for the latest installment of our Salon Sessions, a breakfast series we’ve been hosting for the local UX community to share ideas and stay informed about emerging topics in user experience. We intentionally keep these events small, so you can engage in deeper conversations, hear the good and the bad on every topic, and share stories in a closed setting.
We invited Kathy to join us so we could dive into tactical recommendations for building an ethical AI strategy. While Kathy is best known as the co-author of Understanding Your Users, a canonical text in user research, she’s rapidly becoming known for her recent work on ethical practices in AI. Her insights are noteworthy in that they don’t just touch on ethical lapses, they focus on practical broad-based solutions. Here are some of the highlights from our conversation.
Despite the rise in awareness of AI’s ethical risks, we keep seeing examples of tech companies releasing AI-enabled products where it appears nobody considered the ethical implications. What is going on?
One of the issues has been hubris. There’s this assumption that we’re out to do good, and the decisions that we make are therefore good.
*I recently got into a debate with someone who was predicting that everyone would soon have their own digital assistant to schedule meetings for them and complete tasks on their behalf, and he cited a stat about how many people have smart speakers in their homes. But I’m from rural Georgia and I can tell you there are still large swaths of the country where people don’t have access to the internet. *[39% of rural Americans lack access to broadband.] So companies can distribute free Chromebooks ’til the cows come home, but there are parents that have to drive to the parking lot of the school or the public library where there’s Wifi so their kids can do homework at night. It’s that lack of awareness and these assumptions we make that’s harmful.
