Over 10 years experience of Traceability Solutions
By Pharmatrax Author
Category: Technoloy
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The COVID-19 crisis puts new and particular demands on government and corporate leadership.Companies and agencies using artificial intelligence/machine learning tools will need to develop real-world governance practices to maintain consumer confidence in the medium and long term.
The COVID-19 crisis is shining a bright light on the rapid development and adoption of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) for impact real-life, real-time settings. Virus or no virus, advances in technology (along with profound demographic shifts worldwide and climate change) guarantee the coming decade will be one of transformation and dislocation. However, already we can see that AI/ML is central to the COVID-19 picture – and when put to use, these technologies require concerted assessment, thoughtful governance and careful handling by the people using them. This crisis then puts new and particular demands on government and corporate leadership.
Our most effective, immediate and distributed tools for limiting the spread of COVID-19 basically define “low-tech”: keeping physical distance, staying home, washing hands, and staying physically fit, to the extent possible. Our grandmothers would be proud. But the companion to these measures, and what largely will determine how well (and how quickly) we emerge from this crisis, are tools and techniques driven by AI/ML – with applications so new and fantastic that we don’t yet know their names, let alone how to assess or to manage their promise and risk, or to integrate their outputs into broader strategies and human institutions.
To grossly oversimplify, any AI/ML model uses vast quantities of historical data to produce powerful predictions about the future. These predictions and insights by definition exceed the ability of human processing, which can be seen as both its strength and its weakness.
In other words, the technical aspects of AI/ML tools are only half the story, the other half being how we – the people – build, use and govern them. And this is where the current COVID-19 crisis presents both a key opportunity and a key challenge: by rushing the adoption of AI for the long term, it also rushes the need for government and corporate leadership to pay attention to how we design and manage powerful, early-stage technologies.
How to protect human rights and values is the subject of robust discussion and early efforts at regulation. Right now, however, businesses and governments are making decisions today about how these tools are used and what impacts they will have. Nevertheless, there are no common standards yet for internal quality or external uses or one-size-fits-all solutions for different applications of AI/ML. So every company and every agency using AI/ML tools will need to develop real-world governance practices – at a use case level – that reflect both their broader missions and quickly-changing market standards.
Otherwise they risk avoidable loss of customer and public confidence, disruption of operations, legal liability and crises of trust and reputation if they do not prioritize the governance of these technologies as part of their broader strategic and oversight work. At some point, it will be unthinkable for businesses or agencies using AI/ML tools not to have a plan or strategy for managing these risks along with the benefits. But that work really needs to start now, as this public health crisis hastens the use of these tools in settings with direct impact on patients, healthcare providers and the rest of us.