AI, Data Ethics, and Human Productivity

Thank you for the kind words.

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, claims that AI can enhance human productivity require exploring which characteristics of humanity we are trying to improve. Human agency (the ability to think and act independently of our environment) might be one, and the capacities of abstraction and empathy might be another. Human intelligence is a much broader concept than that of machine intelligence — and consciousness evokes the multiple dimensions of human perception (emotional, intrapersonal, rational, existentiel…).

AI’s impact on how we measure human productivity is a topic in itself — for machine learning and AI in their current forms contribute to certain human activities while detracting from others. It’s also quite possible that the widespread use of Data Science and AI will influence how we evaluate human activity (“production boundaries”) — moving the yardstick of measures of both value and value(s).