Why Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Needs Humans in the Loop
In the aftermath of the Pegasus Spyware software revelation there were calls from all sectors of society for vendors to better regulate and control their software development. The reactions were not really surprising. There has been a well-documented suspicion of technology and what it can do going back for years.
The Chapman University Survey of American Fears Wave 7 for 2020 to 2021, for example, which as was the result of a random sample of 1,035 adults across the United States taken in January of this year, showed that cyber-terrorism was 8th in the list of 95 fears followed by government tracking of personal data in 16th place Corrupt government officials scared people the most ahead of the COVID, according to a majority of those surveyed. In fact, in the list of fears, while technology was not directly mentioned, nearly 28% of people cited computers replacing people in the workforce as a major fear. That said, how scared people really are of these things can be best judged by the fact that nearly 10% appear to be scared of zombies!
Even still, the fact that people are genuinely scared they will lose their jobs to AI has already been discussed and the fact that UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, recently called for moratoriums on the sale and use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems until adequate safeguards are put in place, shows how serious concerns about AI are. This also includes, of course, other technologies built using AI like deep learning platforms(DLP) robotic process automation (RPA), text analytics and natural language processing (NLP). Bachelet warned, “Artificial intelligence can be a force for good, helping societies overcome some of the great challenges of our times. But AI technologies can have negative, even catastrophic, effects if they are used without sufficient regard to how they affect people’s human rights”.
So how should enterprises respond, or is there even any need to respond given the limited environments in which they use AI? Recent research from New York City-based Bright Data on the use of Bots in the enterprise, indicates that despite calls for tight regulation on AI and its use, many enterprises have shown an appetite for tighter external regulation of bot use among technology and financial services decision-makers. The research reveals that most US and UK organizations that utilize bots have developed clear guidelines to ensure they are used responsibly. In the US, 48% of those surveyed say they have guidelines in place to moderate all uses of bots, while another 48% say they have guidelines relating to some uses of bots. In the UK, these figures are 57% and 40% respectively.
The research evaluated respondents’ attitudes towards bot regulation. Overall, a slim majority of respondents are satisfied with the current level of regulation related to bot use — 47% of those in US organizations and 60% of those in the UK. Meanwhile, 45% of US organizations and 33% of UK organizations say they actively want to see increased external regulation of bots.
It also revealed that the most common uses of bots in corporate environments. Customer service topped the list, with 76% of organizations utilizing bots to deal with customer queries and feedback.
Of organizations which use bots to retrieve data insights, 66% report occasionally using an external provider, whilst 8% of surveyed IT leaders report that their organization does not outsource operations carried out by bots to third parties.
The other common uses of bots revealed in the survey include cybersecurity (51%), the automation of backend tasks (35%), automated trading (23%) and social media engagement (22%).
Chris Bergh, CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based DataKitchen, a DataOps consultancy and platform provider, argues that AI needs human oversight because the humans that created AI need oversight from other humans, and those humans will also need oversight.
