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.

Dr. Steve Chenoweth has nearly 30 years of industry experience, including teaching and evaluating courses for NCR Corporation and AT&T/Lucent. He helped create Rose-Hulman’s programs in software engineering and robotics, including online components of both programs. Dr. Chenoweth has helped coordinate the department’s senior capstone design course, enhancing the student education experience with several industry-sponsored projects. He also is a faculty member for Home for Environmentally Responsible Engineers, a program helping to develop STEM professionals with interests in sustainability. Dr. Chenoweth has also mentored visiting high-school seniors to complete computing projects in Rose-Hulman’s Operation Catapult program.