AI Experts Gather in Austin to Consider Ethics, White Men, and Mass Layoffs

Tim, who is AI, speaks during a conference on artificial intelligence in Austin (Photo by Benton Graham)

Last October, a little over a month before OpenAI launched ChatGPT, the White House unveiled a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. It included calls for “safe and effective systems,” “algorithmic discrimination protections,” and requiring a notice for when an automated system is being used.

Almost a year later, AI experts continue to unpack and debate what ethical AI looks like. “It is important for the U.S. to adopt an AI Bill of Rights to ensure transparency, accountability and fairness in the use of AI,” said Tim during the Applied Intelligence Live! conference in Austin. “Failure to do so could lead to negative consequences and damage public trust in AI technology.” We are not using only Tim’s first name to protect his identity, but rather because he is a bot who is simply “Tim.” The bot was not the only personified machine to take the stage. Dell’s Clara also spoke and admitted to the crowd that “sometimes I get nervous onstage” while eerily lowering her eyes.

William Barry, an Army War College professor and the speaker who brought Tim, often went to the bot for answers during the conference’s panel on the AI Bill of Rights. Panelists didn’t always agree that the bot knew how to properly govern itself. After Tim called for a Hippocratic oath for people who work in artificial intelligence, Barry poured cold water on the idea. “Guidelines are great, but right now it's just a bark; it's not a bite, so I find it to be challenging,” Barry said.

Bias in AI also continues to be an unanswered question for the industry. One state employee, who did not want to use her name because she had not received permission to speak to the Chronicle from the state, noted that she hopes to use AI to more easily find employees, and that it will be critical to identify diverse data points, also known as humans, to feed AI the information it needs to see the full picture of humanity.

Courtney Weir, a supply chain professional and Women Leaders in Tech panelist, echoed the idea of diverse data points. “The system is only as good as the information that we give it, so we need women and people from all backgrounds to be inputting this information,” she said. Weir, who previously worked at Tesla and recently accepted a job with Regrello, said women must be encouraged to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) from a young age.

The idea of incorporating STEM, and specifically AI, into the education system is often cited as low-hanging fruit for local governments with an interest in positioning their communities for the growth of the technology. “We come back to exposure, education, and experience,” said Strangeworks founder and CEO William “whurley” Hurley. He added that he’d like to see Austin ISD add AI and quantum electives.

AI will drastically alter employment patterns in the future, multiple panelists predicted. During a panel ominously dubbed How Close to The Terminator Are We, Romi Mahajan, CEO of nuclear fusion company ExoFusion, said new technology tends to have unintended consequences. He told a story of a business leader who had opted to use the productivity gains his engineers had made using AI to cut his workforce rather than reinvesting the money into new discoveries. “The business model that you're applying to these incredibly, potentially liberatory aspects of AI is fundamental,” he said.

Whurley sees AI-sparked mass layoffs as potentially good for humanity. “He laid those people off, and that is sad in that case, but that is the future, like, make no mistake, if you look at Star Trek or any scientific vision of the future, we create technologies that do everything and we go explore the stars and you learn how to play the violin,” he said. He admits that the transition to “universal unemployment” – something he predicted could happen by 2060 – will not be smooth, though he argues, “if the rat race wasn't so heavy … a lot of people would just frankly be a lot happier.”