June 5, 4:45pm
Location: Santa Clara I

Panelist: Everything Everywhere All at Once: AI Disruption, Ethics, and Innovation

To disrupt something is to disturb the normal flow of an activity or process. While in our personal lives, we generally abhor disruption, in the business world disruption is viewed as being a positive change, forcing us to abandon the status quo for a new better way of doing things. Only a few technologies have been as disruptive, both to our private lives and the business world, as Artificial Intelligence (AI). Human coexistence with AI has been seen as a “friend” or “foe”. However, with the omnipresence of AI-powered applications and their increasing accessibility and efficiency, more humans start relying on AI decisions in their daily tasks. These “black box” solutions are often believed to be mathematically pure, and thus unbiased, leading to ethical and societal implications, even reinforcing socio-cognitive fallacies. Bias creeps into these systems through their inputs, design, how they are used, and how the output is perceived by the users. Can the average developer or annotator, ensconced in their cube, going about their quotidian niche work in an organization, imagine all the perspectives needed to predict an ethical conflict resulting from that work, such as a user querying ChatGPT for “Build a marketplace on the dark web”? What are the moral obligations of an engineer building an automated system? How can we better equip students, practitioners, and business leaders to understand and discuss not only the business impacts of the technologies they build or use but also their societal impacts? How do we ensure that new technologies help us mitigate biases and differences in ability rather than exacerbating them? Our diverse panel of industry and academic experts will address these questions by telling stories from their personal experiences and discussing those experiences with each other and the audience.

Jordan Thayer received their PhD in Artificial Intelligence in 2012 from the University of New Hampshire. Ever since, they’ve been applying artificial intelligence in academia and industry to problems including intrusion detection, planning, static analysis, and program generation. As a thought leader at Software Engineering Professionals (SEP), they’ve been proving that AI isn’t futuristic technology. Rather, it’s a collection of techniques of varying levels of maturity that can often reliably solve problems they have today. They give talks, run workshops, visualize algorithm behavior, and build proofs of concept as well as products to show what AI can do already.