Discussing AI, Leadership Series Speaker Encourages Audience to Embrace Their Humanity

Even Kevin Roose, the New York Times technology columnist who headlined the annual Rockhurst University Leadership Series event Tuesday night, has been creeped out at times interacting with artificial intelligence.

The guest of the event Tuesday at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, with presenting sponsor Tria Health, shared a high-profile example, where his interaction with the search engine Bing’s AI chatbot professed its love for him and attempted to convince him to leave his wife (it didn’t work). There are plenty of other instances that range from mildly unsettling to jarring. None of them change the fact that artificial intelligence continues to improve at a rapid pace — some programs are already sophisticated enough to be qualified for a job at Google, pass the Bar exam or diagnose medical ailments accurately, according to Roose.

 “In about the last four years, AI labs have been making huge leaps ahead in areas that are related to sort of just general intelligence,” he said.

AI is changing the landscape of the workforce, and there are indications it will continue to do so. With all of that, there are plenty of “AI doomers” alongside the optimists, even amongst those developing the technology. But Roose gave three pieces of advice to those in the audience who felt uneasy about this technology: get to know and challenge AI to better understand its capabilities and limitations; develop “deep skills” that cannot be replicated by the technology; and develop your own sense of “taste” by getting to know your own values and periodically disconnecting with technology.

“If we really care about leadership in this new world, we need to not only have our own tastes and values, but we need to guard that taste from any attempt to influence us,” Roose said. “Because as soon as we start letting AI make decisions for us, we become its servants.”

In his keynote and throughout the question-and-answer session that followed with Rockhurst EMBA student Anil Chauhan, MD, professor of radiology and the department vice-chair of artificial intelligence, informatics, and innovation and Rockhurst President Sandra Cassady, Ph.D., Roose stressed that those who will emerge as leaders in the age of AI aren’t those who will try to compete on that turf.

“The way forward is not to try to overpower AI, try to compete with its own on its own terms or even reject it. But instead to focus on what we're best at, which is being humans,” he said.