Canine Intelligence ?
You have to laugh when you are with Simone Moore. It's one of her core values, and infectiously so. It's an important part of why she spends so much time talking about what it is to be human, and how technology should be serving rather than controlling our emotions. But for me the funniest moment in Simone's webinar on AI and emotions came just before it started when Simone had left the room after checking with me that the technology was working. The background was blurred until a dog carefully climbed onto her empty seat, moving into sharp focus and examined the computer in front of him with an almost human inquisitiveness. More thoughtful than a cat wandering randomly across a keyboard, it was as though Canine Intelligence had arrived. And then he decided today wasn't the day to mess with Simone's webinar set-up, and quietly left the room.
Emotional AI
With Toby gone we set off on our journey, pausing to look how far the world of computing has come, and considering whether that scares or excites us, or both. Then we plunged into the future that is today. Where Emotional AI meets Industry 5.0 ("look it up !") it's not about smarter machines, it's about rediscovering our humanity. Technology that imitates our emotions in an attempt to seem human is missing the point here. After all, mimicry is not the same as meaning, and Emotional AI should support us in our human emotions rather than simulate them. Our misunderstanding of our feelings and the role they play doesn't help us here. Emotions are a chaos that AI can't predict ! However, emotions aren't an error. Rather they are a code for connection, and connection is what we want. In that sense emotions are data.
This is a dimension that has been largely ignored in our processes. To put it another way, feelings don't break systems, but if we ignore feelings, then that does. How might we account for that in our KPIs ? Could we get our heads (and hearts) round having Psychological Safety as a KPI, for example ? To put it in Simone's words : "Emotional AI isn't about making machines cry. It's about helping humans heal, think, thrive". In such a world psychological safety is the new uptime. This is a crucial insight. Taking this seriously could have a huge impact on how we treat our staff. It could see technology being used to help us manage mental health corporately.
AI in a flawed world
We've known for a long time that if you put garbage into a process you get garbage out. James in the first of this AI webinar series highlighted that AI amplifies this effect. Dare I say that Simone amplified that message ! But she also added to it. Maybe we have a dream of flawless technology, but we are not flawless humans, and as such that's not what we are going to create, not just because of any limitations to the algorithms, but because the data we feed it and the ethics that we apply to it are a product of that flawed world. To put it another way, if we want our AI to take us to good places we need to be able to lead by example.
So, it's not so much that AI is going to save the world. But AI can still do a huge amount for us. Take the challenge of dealing with the modern world. We are faced with serious cognitive load management challenges. We would like AI to simplify this and to take some of the mundane out of that load, freeing us up to be creative and do the interesting stuff.
AI and Human Dignity
James had talked about governance and its high relevance to AI. Simone wanted to see governance as something that sparkles. This isn't how we normally think about it ! To put it another way, governance should be the compass to guide us, not a cage to trap us. And we should be working with that to build trust by design. Simone expressed this as a Governance, Risk and Compassion framework rather than the usual Compliance. This is about moving from risk management being box ticking to it becoming a way of thinking. It becomes an empathetic response that breaks through barriers rather than breaks down in the face of them. The loud proclamation was that ethics can become culture.
In short, we want to be designing our use of technology to respect human dignity, to help us build connections and be more thoroughly human. This isn't a world of perfections, but one in which we need to honour the essential messiness of life.
Some tips
So, what can we do ? Simone left us with some tips to attend to
· Make empathy a KPI - feelings drive functions, and should not just be a by-product
· Position AI to help ethical decisions rather than to drive them. Our governance should include Traparency, Accountability and Empathy.
· Test with humans to build services that take humans into account. The emotional journey should be part of what we testing for.
· Help customers and employees feel like the main character - "Boring experiences are so last season"
Concluding thoughts
Where is all this going ? Let's step back to the beginning , and what we're trying to achieve. We're looking for a world "where machines amplify what makes us beautifully human" and where we might talk about Augmented Intelligence rather than Artificial Intelligence.
Simone has clearly invested a lot of herself in this and for the full expressiveness of her insight I would recommend catching up with her either in person (e.g. at the itSMF Slovenia Conference, or the itSMF UK Conference) or through watching the recording of this webinar. Collaboration is very much Simone's thing and it was no surprise to find her making connections with attendees on the webinar, renewing old acquaintances, welcoming new people, picking up on interesting work people are doing and encouraging ongoing persistence and dedication. These are ways of connecting and enhancing what we do that go beyond what AI can do for us. But maybe the approaches she was teasing out with us can contribute to more effective collaboration and that Augmented Intelligence.
Finally, another quote from Simone "You've got to laugh through the chaos ... that's how breakthroughs often happen"
Supporting Materials
If you would like to watch it, here is the recording of Simone's webinar and the recording of the questions at the end
And here is where you can register for the 3rd webinar in the series from Katrina McDermid
You may also be interested in this blog about the first webinar in the series