LAKE HAVASU CITY – Rebecca Lindstrom is a kinesiology lecturer for the College of Health Solutions at ASU Lake Havasu. Last month, Lindstrom brought back Wednesday Night Lecture series on campus with Dr. Wilson’s climate change lecture. Last week, the series continued with a discussion about artificial intelligence (AI).
What are some of the benefits of the technology, and what are the disadvantages of AI? This was a panel discussion with professors from Mohave Community College and ASU at Lake Havasu. The panel addressed topics and questions such as how AI is currently being used.
The panel addressed how AI can be helpful but also emphasized that AI was initially created to imitate humanity but it was not designed to have an understanding of the information it puts out. Biased and discrimination algorithms were introduced as being one of the negatives of AI. The famous Amazon experimental hiring story was brought up as one example to explain how AI can be somewhat misleading. Their AI hiring process was discriminating against hiring women because the models of the computer had been set up to select certain candidates. The system viewed the traits of some applications given to Amazon.
Within a 10-year period, their AI system preferred male resumes and omitted applications with the word “women” in it. On the positive side of this topic, the panels explained how AI is a helpful tool, especially to perform repetitive tasks in the workplace. Today, many companies seeking to increase productivity use AI to decrease duties of occupations that employees feel are monotonous.
These are usually tasks that companies feel eliminate productivity with staff. Instead of spending two and a half hours in a workday replying to emails, companies can eliminate this with email plug-ins. Plug-ins that are capable of generating automatic email responses. The panel explained the benefits that AI can bring to the education world with free writing assistants like Grammarly and Hemingway.
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series was created to educate the community on topics that will help them in their daily lives.
The impact AI has on education and the economy, and much more. Another lecture is scheduled Wednesday, Nov. 15. The topic will be, The Human Side of Cybersecurity and Privacy. The lecture will cover how scammers can gain access to people’s private information and how you can protect yourself against hackers and theft.
Phaedra Veronique
