How to Create Values and Ethics to AI in the Workplace?

The rapid development in technology, especially of Artificial Intelligence, will have the capability to transform every major aspect of an organization and open new opportunities than ever before. The use of AI will only grow as a report from BCG and MIT Sloan Management Review revealed that 85 percent of executives claimed AI will provide their companies a competitive advantage, while 60 percent reported an AI strategy to be an urgent need for their organisation.

In recent years, AI became the subject of interest for many businesses that has spilled into the workplace with the ever-increasing use of AI-driven automation and robotics to perform traditional tasks. However, the ethics surrounding the development and use of artificial intelligence remain provocative, creating a significant constraining factor to AI's full potential.

In February this year, the U.S. Department of Defense adopted ethical principles for Artificial Intelligence, which is based on the Defense Innovation Board's set of AI ethical guidelines proposed last year. Though considerations of ethical and legal implications are not new to defense organizations, they are starting to become more prevalent in AI engineering teams.

The widespread uptake in this technology use comes at a time when more and more businesses are proactively addressing diversity and inclusivity among their workforce.

Reports suggest that the US needs a curious, ethical AI workforce that works collaboratively to make reliable AI systems. In this way, members of AI development teams need to act over deep discussions regarding the implications of their work on the warfighters using them. In order to build AI systems effectively and ethically, defense organizations must encourage an ethical, inclusive work environment and procure a diverse workforce.

This workforce should involve curiosity experts, a team of professionals who focus on human needs and behaviors, who are more likely to envision unsolicited and unintended consequences associated with the system's use and mismanagement, and ask tough questions about those consequences.

According to a research report, building cognitively diverse teams solve problems faster than teams of cognitively similar people. This also paves ways for innovation and creativity to flow, minimizing the risk of homogenous ideas coming to the fore. This means people with similar concepts and a similar education are more likely to miss the same problems because of their shared bias, and the data utilized by AI systems are also biased. Thus, an organization's bias will likely to pervasive in the data the company provided and the AI systems built with that data will perpetuate the bias.

However, bringing together a diverse workforce that involves talented, experienced people will strengthen ethics around the technology. This will further support the work in the workplace by instilling the workforce with curiosity, empathy, and understanding for the warfighters using and affected by the systems. So, there is a need for a diverse and inclusive leadership that can entice and retain talent in order to a business's success.

Furthermore, without an ethical framework, artificial intelligence is limited. Creating ethical frameworks into the technology will assist organizations to support project teams in making better, more confident decisions that are ethical. However, this will become harder for project teams to align without technology ethics, and vital discussions may be unintentionally skipped.