PEOPLE matters

AI – Artificial or Augmented Intelligence?

Richard Plenty and Terri Morrissey share their thoughts on some of the human challenges associated with the rapidly developing field of AI.

We are just back from facilitating a Global Psychology Summit in Kingston, Jamaica, at which a key topic was the rapidly developing field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the promise, limitations and ethical challenges associated with this rapidly developing field.

This is an area from which we will not be able to hide. AI already outperforms humans on pattern recognition, searching the internet for relevant material, and data analysis. Generative large language models can produce summaries of complex issues in seconds. They are also becoming widely available. Chat GPT, for example, launched in late 2022, can now be used by anyone with a smart phone.

Advances are occurring so fast that it is almost impossible to be an expert in the field. Nevertheless, at the Kingston summit on March 19, a panel of ‘almost-experts’ did their best to consider the implications. On the whole, they were positive. They claimed that there are exciting opportunities for innovation and expressed the hope that AI will lead to enormous benefits for us all.

As an example, the ability to search large volumes of material on the internet, cutting down the time needed to trawl through documents and being able to search in multiple languages across many databases, provides a real boost for evidence-based research, especially when combined with the ability to synthesise and summarise material in a readable, concise format.

At the same time, our panelists warned of the complex and challenging issues associated with its uptake. It is unwise to rely on what emerges from the technology without a hefty input from an expert human source.

AI, at least in its present iterations, makes too many mistakes. It weighs sources equally, unable to distinguish between their quality. Searches are based on historical data. Consequently, algorithmic bias can lead to stereotypes being perpetuated.

For example, Amazon’s initial efforts to produce a recruiting tool preferred male candidates for technical jobs.

Things can go badly wrong without human judgment. Large language models rely on searching the web for similar responses rather than logic. For instance, one of the panelists had asked a large language model ‘How many ‘r’s’ are there in strawberry?’ Unable to find anyone in its databases who had asked this exact question before, it replied ‘2’.

So, it is the collective intelligence of people and the technology that really makes the difference, rather than the technology on its own. The clever way to use it is to get AI to do the ‘heavy lifting’, curate the material that emerges, take what is best and then refine efforts by asking incisive more detailed questions. A computer-human endeavour!

This use of AI as ‘augmented intelligence’ rather than ‘artificial intelligence’ is beautifully illustrated in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review by Christian Stadler and Martin Reeves called “When AI Gets a Board Seat”, describing a year-long experiment involving a group of managers and their use of Chat GPT.

The article concludes that what makes AI a valuable member of the executive team is that it differs from humans by disrupting and broadening what is taken into account and providing information quickly. For this to work effectively, it needs a human critical thinker in the loop.

All of this implies that we need to spend much more time understanding how to use digital technology, educating and training people how best to use it. It seems that while we won’t be able to live without it, we will need to spend time and effort learning how to live with it.

About the authors

Terri Morrissey and Dr Richard Plenty run ACI’s Human Resources training. They received a Presidential Citation from the American Psychological Association in June 2022 for their leadership in advancing global psychology.

Contact them at info@thisis.eu

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