Our fourth episode, “Artificial Intelligence and Bias”, features guest speakers Mutale Nkonde, Todd Marlin, and Avi Gesser.  I asked our guests for one “actionable, monetizable takeaway” for our listeners.  Mutale said:

“My monetizable, marketable takeaway is that this market is only growing.  So if you are somebody that’s listening and looking for a job or thinking about creating a future, McKinsey did a report that said that AI is going to be adding between 3.5 trillion to 5.8 trillion per annum to the U.S. economy across 19 sectors.  That was in 2018, this is pre-pandemic.  So that means that there are going to be jobs in being able to explain the technology.  I think it’s very interesting that none of us are engineers on this panel.  So developing products isn’t actually something that is just done by engineers.  We like to think that there are these people coding and creating apps in the back, but 50% of all tech firms are non-engineering.  The other thing I would say is, for people like me that are looking at the critical side of AI, who are looking at protected classes, there’s always going to be work there too, because these blind spots that I’m describing are also encoded in our society.  So there’s always going to be a job for people that want to look at the blind spots.  As well as doing this work I’m doing in the public interest, I am somebody that comes from Tech.  I have startup background for people that are interested in entrepreneurialism, and like me are kind of bleeding heart type folks.  And there are amazing things.  I’m working on another project that’s looking at the promise of AI to mitigate climate change.  So the big, big, big, big problems that we’re facing can be solved in this way if we do what Avi and Todd have been speaking about, and kind of slow down and be thoughtful.”

Interested in hearing more?  Check out Episode 4 here (available September 23, 2021).