When you’re ready to incorporate artificial intelligence technologies in your business, the analysis you should perform is this: What can possibly go wrong? What is our product or service expected to do? What happens if it fails to do so? Do we have a damage mitigation plan? Consider the embarrassing situation that Microsoft found itself in with its Tay chatbot fiasco, where internet trolls exploited vulnerabilities in the bot’s code, feeding it racist, homophobic, and sexist content that millions read on social media.
What Will Happen When Your Company’s Algorithms Go Wrong?
You need to have a plan.
April 10, 2017
Summary.
An AI designed to do X will eventually fail to do X. Spam filters block important emails, GPS provides faulty directions, machine translations corrupt the meaning of phrases, autocorrect replaces a desired word with a wrong one, biometric systems misrecognize people, transcription software fails to capture what is being said; overall, it is harder to find examples of AIs that don’t fail. The failures of today’s narrow domain AIs are just the tip of the iceberg; once we develop general artificial intelligence capable of cross-domain performance, embarrassment from such failures will be the least of our concerns. That’s why we need to put best practices in place now.
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New!
HBR Learning
Digital Intelligence Course
Accelerate your career with Harvard ManageMentor®. HBR Learning’s online leadership training helps you hone your skills with courses like Digital Intelligence . Earn badges to share on LinkedIn and your resume. Access more than 40 courses trusted by Fortune 500 companies.
Excel in a world that's being continually transformed by technology.