Citing a recent future-of-work study of 774 Indian companies – which found that 71 per cent had fewer than 10 per cent women and 30 per moldova cell phone database cent had no women at all – Dr Samir Saran, president of Indian thinktank the Observer Research Foundation, warned that developers of the AI workforce need to take a different approach.
“We have to distinguish between Star Wars and
‘narrow AI’” that is applied to specific functions, as in a manufacturing setting, Saran said, noting that “collaboration of machine with a modestly skilled person in the emerging world allows them to deliver more, and gives them a greater return on their time than they were ever able to get previously.”
With so few women represented in the design of AI systems, he said, “right now we have to undo a lot of historic wrongs. We need an unlevel playing field, and we have to program for that unlevel playing field by adding synthetic data to rectify some of the past.”
Developers need to stop focusing so much on the technology and think more about its social context, he added.
“The hunt for the elusive unicorn using
tech models and workspaces is damaging larger constructs,” Saran said, warning that technology education needs to step back from its deterministic focus on AI and take a broader perspective.
“We need to invest huge amounts into social sciences and thinking about the social dimensions of technology now,” he said, “because we are losing the race.”
“Technologists need to be humanised, and the need to understand that they are really coding the future – not coding a bottom line. Automation is going to lead us to the need for a new dialogue.”