AI + The New Human Frontier

CHAPTER 28The Elevation of Human Judgment

Going forward, technology may do the lion's share of operational and administrative work, but human oversight, human judgment, and human vigilance will be paramount when it comes to ensuring greater trust and transparency in AI systems. They will also be paramount when it comes to the identification of risk.

Technology and society are changing so rapidly that the calculation and identification of risk is becoming almost prohibitively difficult. Not only are things changing too quickly for risk assessment to ever fully catch up, but much of the risk now emerging is what we might call risk in the white space: risk where it may not have been predictable beforehand and/or risk that does not tie back to any clearly liable entity. For example, if a new technology changes the way that our brains operate—to the eventual detriment of our performance of other real-world tasks—then is there a tangible “risk” associated with that technology? If so, are the developer and distributor of that technology liable? In a world increasingly dominated by AI and big data, it seems inconceivable that calculation of risk could be such an imperfect science. But nowadays, all companies and institutions—across all sectors—play in the “white space.” And that white space is getting even harder to determine in a world where trust and truth are in decline. In the future, businesses will each be increasingly defined by how they systematically evaluate white space risks. ...