Human First AI Can Pave The Way For a Second Renaissance: Ali Azeem (Transcript)

Read here the full transcript of Award-winning strategist Ali Azeem’s talk titled “Human First AI Can Pave The Way For a Second Renaissance” at TEDxKings Parade St 2024 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Do you have a story that you keep close to your chest? I want you to think about it for just a moment. Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to share. My talk today is about AI and my hopes for the future.

Personal Background

But given this is TED, I was convinced to start with a bit about myself. I grew up in Essex, not far from London. I may have lost the accent, but I’m still a cheeky chappy, don’t worry. That said, looking back, I was also a bit of a geek, less interested in football and wrestling, more into comics and video games.

My parents worked hard at a small accountancy that they owned, and as a kid I thought I had it all figured out. I had a plan, you see. I was going to start my own company, join them in the accountancy, oh, and open a McDonald’s. I didn’t say it was a good plan.

But that all changed the day that my grandfather died. Without going to the ins and outs of it all, under the strain, my parents’ relationship splintered, and at the age of 12, I ended up homeless. One day, I was safe and sound in my Mario-themed bedroom, surrounded by games and toys, and the next, I was staring at the ceiling of a damp, empty room that I was sharing with my mum and my sister at a women’s refuge. You know, I’m 40 now, and I don’t think I’ve ever really told this story.

I remember at the time I felt like my life was over, but I was saved by the people around me, my friends, my family, the teachers, the social workers.

They reminded me that I had to use my mind if I wanted to avoid losing my head. It was this one girl from school that I’ll never forget. On lunch breaks, we would walk round and round the school, where she’d listen to me talk endlessly about me building a new PC with my neighbour, or thoughts on what I need to change in politics.

And on my low days, where I felt like all my struggling was in vain, she would remind me that I still had the same opportunities as everyone else, providing I continued to work hard for them. And so I did. I became one of the first from my school to go on to study at Cambridge University. The experience taught me the importance of self-determination, but also that I couldn’t do it alone.

The Importance of Community

And truly, I don’t think any of us can. And once you understand this, then you understand that we need a society that encourages us to both pursue our dreams, whilst also helping others pursue theirs. That’s why I consider myself privileged to work as a changemaker in business, technology and politics, across some of the biggest challenges of the past 20 years. I’ve helped small businesses during the credit crunch as a policy advisor, I’ve worked on reducing knife crime as a charity trustee, and I’ve assisted in the recent vaccine rollouts as a partner of a consulting firm.

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Now, as Global Head of Growth at Access Partnership, I’m proud to be part of a team that works with government and private sector disruptors to bring positive change. So what have I learned from all of my experience? It’s that business and institutions are not focusing enough on the people, even when it’s better for them in the long run. And that’s why we need to be human first.

Being Human First

Being human first is about making the benefit of people central to your goals, something that I really feel is lacking right now. But it’s also about understanding that people and companies will consider their own benefit in their decisions too. We’re all motivated by wanting to do what’s right for us and our families, but also doing what’s right for others. Any approach that forgets this will remain a noble but unrealistic ambition.

That’s why the idea of human first seeks to align the virtues of individual autonomy and free enterprise with that of human benefit. And to make this happen, we need to start with challenges that allow us to enjoy both. That instead of there being an inevitable conflict between positive change and individual interest, there’s typically a win-win that individuals, companies, and governments can get behind. This is especially true for artificial intelligence, which most people are, quite frankly, terrified about.

AI and Its Challenges

With AI developing at a rapid pace, the stakes are high. The number of directions we could go abroad, spanning the good, the bad, and the downright ugly. At Access Partnership, we’ve worked extensively on advising governments on AI policy, not to mention leading tech firms like Microsoft and Google to drive adoption. From this experience, I can take you through a few scenarios and bring to life three principles that will help us be human first.

In terms of bad scenarios, there’s lots written, not to mention tweeted, on dystopian futures of us being enslaved or even wiped out by our own technology. I think it’s obvious we want to avoid that. But even if we don’t go to this extreme, we can also see a world where AI piles on to our challenges, an unsafe world, a divided world, a less human world. But we don’t have to imagine this.

2022 saw panic and confusion briefly erupt with videos of Ukraine’s President Zelensky emerging, instructing his soldiers to lay down their arms. It wasn’t him, just another questionable application of deepfake technology. With the literal impact on human life being highlighted, it raised questions on whether this technology was focused on adding value. And if it was, was enough being done to minimize the misuse?

The Importance of Purpose

Part of the reason for this is that we lack a genuine human purpose behind these companies. This creates a tendency to keep going down a road blindly, avoiding dead ends and just seeing where we end up. Don’t mistake it for innocent curiosity, it’s not, it’s reckless behavior. The easiest way to avoid that trap is to have a clearly defined reason why, a why that guides innovation and considers the implication on people.

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I think it’s obvious why this leads to better outcomes for society, but it also benefits the companies too. Having a purpose will help you focus your efforts and gives all of your employees more direction in what they’re doing. No wonder purpose-led organizations outperform other companies by over 40%.

The Risk of Inequality

Let’s paint another picture, one where AI leads to a further divide between the haves and the have-nots. This might happen because powerful tools are being developed and reserved for a small group of people, or worse yet, used by many but with a major bias. This would impact marginalized groups the most, of course, quite potentially, bringing the prejudice of the past and making them a permanent feature of society.

Unfortunately, this is also already unfolding through accessibility of the latest AI releases. Not to mention the hardware and energy required to run them. Heck, that doesn’t even include the unintended biases. A recent study showed if mortgage applicants were black, they’d need credit scores of around 120 points higher than if they were white to achieve the same approval rate.

The Need for Diverse Perspectives

That’s why we need to think more about the people, both the users and the makers. As someone that studied computer science here, I can confirm we don’t always have a broad range of backgrounds for our engineers. Heck, I still remember attending lecture halls made for hundreds that barely fit all the male computer scientists, yet the ones that were female could comfortably fit in an Uber. This view holds true for AI engineers too, where 94% are men.

Now rather than comment on the reasons for this or what we should do in the long run, I want to focus on what we do now, and that involves getting a greater number of perspectives into account for different types of people. We should get researchers involved, anthropologists, policy teams. How about people from totally different backgrounds? And not just the usual demographics, by the way, different vocations, experiences, neurotypes. As someone that’s worked in corporate inventing, I can assure you that this will bring about incredible improvements to what you create. Not to mention the positive impact it can have.

But this is only half the battle. A company’s innovation could be out of this world, but if you limit the number of people that can use it, the impact is diminished. Not only do you help fewer people, you’re not factoring in the data and learnings that come from having them on board. In short, if you have less input from everyone, you get less output from everyone.

By the way, there’s a study that shows there’s a strong desire for different people to get involved. One of the pieces of work we did with Amazon surveyed over 30,000 professionals around the world and found that women and older workers expressed a real strong interest in acquiring AI skills to advance their career. This is especially true in countries like India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Beyond Economic Growth

So far, our scenarios have been about what can go wrong, but the absence of what’s bad is not necessarily what’s good. Today, most of the benefits touted by tech evangelists have been around increasing productivity and the amount of economic growth that can come from AI. It’s an important and impactful application, no doubt, but it feels a bit unambitious, a bit underwhelming to me. As enticing as economic growth is, it doesn’t actually capture what matters. It lacks the beauty.

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Robert Kennedy said it best when talking of economic growth, that “it measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.” AI has an opportunity to redress this, creating ways for us to pursue our passions, do more of what we want to do, not just do what we don’t want to do, but faster. This will only come if we rethink the proposition offered by our AI products. We shouldn’t be solely focused on the fourth industrial revolution, but also think about the second renaissance.

During the first renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci had several assistants that would help bring his ideas into reality. With AI, we could all have our own aides available to bring our ideas to life. Yes, it will be different, given the number of people that can access AI, but the quantum of beauty created will increase too. In a similar way to how photography forced painters to rethink their craft, giving rise to modern art, AI will no doubt bring its own rebirth to the nature of human talent and imagination.

Conclusion

These three principles are designed to help ensure AI adds to the human experience instead of taking away from it. I want you to think back to that moment of your own lives and stories. Could a human-first AI have helped you in some way? Here’s one last scenario.

One where people, regardless of their background, can find new ways to reach their potential. Where AI allows a young girl from a village in Indonesia to create a new app. Or a pensioner from Mississippi to become a filmmaker, extolling his wisdoms to the world, starting with his grandkids. Or indeed, a boy who finds himself staring up at the ceiling after his world’s just fallen apart, yet still believing that indeed the sky’s the limit.

Before I go, in case anyone might be wondering what happened to that girl from school, let me tell you. She’s now my wife and mother of my three kids. In fact, today marks 18 years since our wedding. Happy anniversary, Hina.

Not only did you encourage me to tell my story today, you helped me write it. Thank you for always prioritising the people in your life. After all, being human-first starts first with being human. Thank you.