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Daily Coping Tip Share an article, book, or podcast that helped you I also have a thread at SQLServerCentral dealing with coping mechanisms and resources. Feel free to participate. For many of you out there working in a new way, I'm including a thought of the day on how to cope in this challenging time from The Action for Happiness Coping Calendar. My items will be on my blog, feel free to share yours. |
Where We Need Better AI Disclosure and Responsibility There are a lot of contract and gig jobs taking place in the world today. It used to be this was widely spread throughout programming and technology, but these days many types of jobs are commonly done as contract workers. I like the flexibility, but I also think that contract workers need to be better at saving and planning for the future because of less employment stability. One trend that I've seen taking place in some of these positions is the use of software and AI to determine if a worker is doing an acceptable level of work on a regular basis. Amazon might be one of the highest-profile companies doing this, as they expand into the delivery business. They are using the power of computers to manage an army of workers. This includes terminating them. There's an article that talks about some of the experiences. I don't know how their system works, but I do know the frustration of trying to work with a company that doesn't use humans for many tasks. If you've ever tried to contact Google, you know that it's incredibly difficult to actually communicate with a human. Google seems to think that its automated systems can handle all situations. They might handle many things, but they don't do a good job in plenty of situations, and there is little recourse to have a human intervene. I do think that AI and ML can help in many cases, but they certainly are looking for broad patterns. Maybe this handles the middle 80% of cases, or maybe it's more like 60%, but there are plenty of situations where humans ought to be involved. Maybe more important, when someone uses these systems to make decisions that impact humans, there should be some explanation and understanding of how the general model impacts this specific situation. We want to know why the computer comes to its conclusion in medical care, employment, legal issues, or maybe anything else. There is work being done to try and explain how these models work. The important thing, however, is to ensure that while we understand, we also need to disclose this to those affected by how the systems work. Any appeal process should include this explanation, and likely with a human involved at some point to help evaluate the model for accuracy, fairness, or any other measure that is relevant. Steve Jones - SSC Editor Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums |
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