A.I. tells you what to do, and I say so what!!
For this week's blog, I turn to Helen Edwards, founder of Sonder Scheme, and qChange's Cheif A.I. Ethics Officer. Helen explores the cross-section between A.I. product focused design and humans accepting advice based on algorithms. Whether we like or not, A.I. tells us what to do every day. I just say so what.
Remember to grab your free digital or audio copy of amazon distributed book, The Crucibles Gift.
People Like Advice from A.I.
-Helen Edwards

People frequently ask for advice then ignore it, dislike being bored yet are happily lazy, hate to lose more than they love to win, and expect a degree of intelligence in an AI that consistently lets them down. Empathy evolved to help humans learn from others’ mistakes. Symbolic and metaphorical thinking evolved so recently that our ability to distinguish between the literal and the metaphorical is poor. People see faces in clouds and attribute human characteristics to non-human objects. As Cassie Kozyrkov, Chief Decision Scientist at Google, says, “if I sew two buttons onto a sock, I might end up talking to it.” For product managers and designers using AI tools, these features of human psychology are especially important because of the learning nature of modern AI systems. People come to an AI product with a mental model of how the AI works. This includes how it gathers its information, how it is supposed to interact, and how truly human-like it is going to be. There are important real-world examples that can tell us what to be aware of when designing AI-enabled products so that users are able to get the best from the AI.
