Connections

HITS Spring: LiveTiles Chief Architect Examines Future of AI Tools

For the last decade, everyone in the media and entertainment industry has had some form of the term “digital transformation” beaten into their heads, and from the move away from paper-based systems to complete access to all of work needs fitting in our pockets, there’s truth to the term.

But artificial intelligence — a field that’s already 60-plus years old — is truly putting a new spin to the term, according to Erik Ralston, chief architect for LiveTiles.

“Tools are just a means to an end, and you can have a useful tool or you can have the right tool, and one of those works a lot better,” he said May 17, speaking at the HITS Spring: The Hollywood Innovation & Technology Summit. “[With AI] right now we’re walking around like we have bullseyes on our backs.”

And for good reason: according to S&P Global, over the next two decades, 47% of all jobs in the U.S. are at risk of automation. And in order to counter that, the creation of AI tools needs to keep in mind on main thing: AI has no morals or ethics, but only what we as humans empower them with, Ralston said.

“An AI-first future is actually an ethics-first future, and that’s the concept that’s going to ensure the future of humanity,” he added. “Everyone’s worrying about machines trapping us, enslaving us in some way. Our minds had millions of years to evolve, constructing groups, and though they are imperfect, they are the greatest creation on this earth for creating an ethical outcome in the world.

“Looking at this from an ethics lens, you realize there are huge problems.”

On the visual recognition side, you can teach AI to differentiate between an apple and an orange, but classifying between a dog and a wolf is less simple, and an area where mankind holds the advantage. “Here’s the first problem with machine learning: the data that you hand it is the data that it trains on,” Ralston said.

“Even if the data were perfect, there’s this problem that we have creating ethical futures, because we didn’t have an ethical past,” Ralston added. He pointed to resumes, where an average organization will spend hundreds of thousands of man hours sifting through them, trying to get to interviews. How do we apply machine learning to that task, without missing the right candidates, or including the wrong ones? And how do you sift through lies on resumes without the human investigative mind?

“This points to the biggest problem with developing these tools: how can you build ethical tools without ethical humans?” Ralston said.

At LiveTiles, the company looks at workplace tools this way: “We support self-service, not self-serving, and in our core products we support enabling people to feed each other with their digital tools,” Ralston said. “In addition to that, an AI-first future needs to be an ethics-first future.”

When human and artificial intelligence work together, employees can be more productive and efficient, and your customer experience can be elevated, he noted.

HITS Spring was produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), in association with Women in Technology: Hollywood (WiTH); the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA) and the Smart Content Council. The event was presented by Entertainment Partners, with sponsorship by Expert System, LiveTiles, Microsoft Azure, Ooyala, Veritone, Amazon Web Services, Avanade, Avid, IBM Security, MarkLogic, Aspera, Light Point Security, MicroStrategy, SAS, Scaeva Technologies, Western Digital, Brainstorm, Zaszou IT Consulting and Bob Gold & Associates.

To access the LiveTiles presentation, click here.