An Interview With Kieran Powell
Humans: Interfacing by text and email with customers. In recent case, a website user got a California car dealer’s chatbot to sell them a 2024 Suburban for $1. The dealership later refused to honor the deal.
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance and integrate into various aspects of business, decision-makers at the highest levels face the complex task of determining where AI can be most effectively utilized and where the human touch remains irreplaceable. This series seeks to explore the nuanced decisions made by C-Suite executives regarding the implementation of AI in their operations. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing John W. Maly.
John is an author, aquanaut and AI futurist. He studied Computer Engineering and Psychology at Syracuse, Computer Science at Stanford, and Law at University of Denver before writing JURIS EX MACHINA.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I was interested in computers from a young age. I studied Computer Engineering and Psychology at Syracuse, and was always fascinated by the overlaps between the two fields of study. I then I studied AI in the course of my masters degree at Stanford, where wrote my first AI (to play strategy games against other AIs). Later, in law school, I began to explore the intersection between AI and other technologies and the law. This field of interest later turned into writing a speculative legal thriller novel about a legal system run by AIs rather than humans. I also work as a legal consultant analyzing intellectual property for AI and computer technologies, and work as an expert witness in cases relating to same.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
I’m currently wrapping up a novel (Juris Ex Machina) which explores the relationship between the justice system and AI. It’s being published by Highlander Press on June 5. I think it will help encourage thought into the future of AI and how we want it to intersect with our society.
Thank you for that. Let’s now shift to the central focus of our discussion. In your experience, what have been the most challenging aspects of integrating AI into your business operations, and how have you balanced these with the need to preserve human-centric roles?
I think a big challenge comes from the persistent asymmetry between what tasks AI can perform in a trustworthy way, and which it cannot. Human oversight remains necessary, at the very least as an ending step, in almost every new AI process, which limits how much automation is possible. Each potential tool must be studied carefully to recognize its strengths and weaknesses, because the potential magnitude of the mistakes it can make is so large. It can be quite time-consuming! I envision a future where various Consumer Reports/Underwriters Lab-style organizations perform audits on AI performance so less manual research is required on the part of business owners and users.
Can you share a specific instance where AI initially seemed like the optimal solution but ultimately proved less effective than human intervention? What did this experience teach you about the limitations of AI in your field?
In my experience, image-generation AIs such as DALL-E can create beautiful scenes, but are very limited in the ways in which they can be guided to revise an image. Even simple requests to refine images can cause it confusion. AI is more a collaborative partner than a tool, and thus, this issue ultimately limits how useful it can be in a business setting.
How do you navigate the ethical implications of implementing AI in your company, especially concerning potential job displacement and ensuring ethical AI usage?
Overall, AIs are a positive economic force that promotes productivity in any company, small or large. While AI takes over jobs on the more menial end of the labor spectrum, it simultaneously creates higher-value-add positions, including programming, hardware design, and will give rise to creative and artistic occupations we don’t even have names for yet! AI is a disruptive force in the job market, but not a destructive one; like all disruptive technologies, it merely requires adaptability to change it from a threat into an opportunity.
Could you describe a successful instance in your company where AI and human skills were synergistically combined to achieve a result that neither could have accomplished alone?
At present, it seems like AI is best used to assist with brainstorming, e.g., formulating lists of ideas or subjects, which allows creative processes to potentially be jump-started and save many hours of team effort. At the other end of the spectrum (namely, finished products) AI is far less reliable, and requires more human oversight.
Based on your experience and success, what are the “5 Things To Keep in Mind When Deciding Where to Use AI and Where to Rely Only on Humans, and Why?” How have these 5 things impacted your work or your career?
1. AI: Deepfake detection. Deepfakes abound. Deepfake virtual kidnappings are already happening, where an AI calls someone pretending to be their loved one, then someone jumps on and demands a ransom. In a recent fraud case, someone used deepfaked voice to trick a European CEO into thinking one of his suppliers was calling, convincing him to do a six-figure transfer that later turned out to be a bogus call from a scammer in Mexico. The only reliable way to spot deepfakes is, ironically, using AI!
2. Humans: Interfacing by text and email with customers. In recent case, a website user got a California car dealer’s chatbot to sell them a 2024 Suburban for $1. The dealership later refused to honor the deal.
3. AI: medical diagnostic imaging, and other large data set analysis. AI excels at this, and routinely outperforms human beings.
4. Humans: Voice interfacing with customers. Until AI can create such a seamless customer service experience that we can stop yelling “Representative!” into our phones over and over, perhaps we should go back to having human operators.
5. Humans: Setting limits for AI. Like any software, an AI can be hacked to make it act in malicious ways, like programming autonomous vehicles or equipment to cause harm. AIs are only as good as the data they “learned” or were pretrained on, and so an AI can “hallucinate” or perpetuate bad data or existing biases present in this data, or even make them worse. There’s also a lack of transparency that is inherent to AIs: the biggest generative AIs are now so complex that even their creators cannot know all of their AI’s capabilities.
Looking towards the future, in which areas of your business do you foresee AI making the most significant impact, and conversely, in which areas do you believe a human touch will remain indispensable?
AIs are already surpassing humans at predicting weather, spotting cancer in medical images, and identifying fraudulent financial transactions. They also enable personalization of educational lessons, customization of entertainment, discovery of new drugs, and the automation of equipment, which makes human beings more efficient. Used correctly, AIs could make a company with 20 employees function as effectively as if it had 50. However, AIs sound just as credible when they give you wrong answers as right answers. Thus, the human touch remains indispensable for performing a “sanity check” on AI output to make sure it’s correct, and represents the values and strategy of the business using it.
AIs will eventually be able to generate music and art individualized for each consumer, based on your their own unique tastes. Your favorite song may soon be one no one’s ever heard except you. This may drastically change the music and entertainment industries. It may also change our society for the worse, since we may lose a lot of the shared cultural experience that binds us together.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Coming up with ways to preserve objective (objectively-verifiable) truth in the AI Age. AI-fabricated news video footage is already being used as propaganda in at least 14 countries, so this is a potential concern as we enter our own election season. We’re entering a social ecosystem where we can’t trust that AIs aren’t deceiving us, but the only way to check is by using some other AIs we didn’t create. Our decades-dormant antitrust laws intended to prevent corporate monopolies may also soon come into play: the number of publicly-traded companies has shrunk by 43% since 1996, which raises concerns about a single media or tech company potentially controlling both the AI creation and AI detection sides of this equation, making it difficult to know what’s true or real.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
https://www.facebook.com/John.W.Maly
https://www.instagram.com/John.W.Maly/
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
About The Interviewer: Kieran is the EVP of Channel V Media, a Public Relations agency based in New York City with a global network of agency partners in over 30 countries. Kieran has advised over 150 companies in the technology, B2B, retail and financial sectors. Previously Kieran worked at Merrill Lynch, PwC, and Ernst & Young. Get in touch with Kieran to discuss how marketing and public relations can help achieve your company’s business goals.
C-Suite Perspectives On AI: John Maly On Where to Use AI and Where to Rely Only on Humans was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.