What is Artificial Intelligence?
Some of the key topics learnt over the semester in this course include economic primer and basic principles, horizontal boundaries of the firm, integration and its alternatives, the power of principles, market analysis, competitive analysis, entry and exit strategies, the dynamics of competing across time, industrial analysis, strategic positioning for competitive advantage, and information and value creation. Additionally, the book used for the course explained the concept of sustaining competitive advantage, measurement of business performance and incentives, strategy and structure, and even environment, power and culture. Therefore, the course was particularly important in educating the learner on the most important concepts in business. However, this paper shall focus on the aspect of artificial intelligence in the workplace and the main ethical issues surrounding it. By and large, this concept is relevant and important because Artificial intelligence has become part and parcel of the modern business world. Companies all over the world are incorporating artificial intelligence into their operations, and it is therefore important to consider its application as regards the workplace, ethics, decision making as well as its contribution to the growth of the firm.
Artificial intelligence refers to the simulation of human intelligence processes by technologies such as computer systems. These gadgets are often designed to think like humans and copy the way people act (Tegmark, n.d.). Over the past few years, artificial intelligence has become a critical component in the work place. Mainly, one can attribute this to the fact that technological advances have become a major component of the modern business world (Mar, 2018). Today, AI is penetrating most key sectors of the economy from healthcare, to transportation, advertising, education, finance and legal. The simulation technique is changing both the competitive landscape and customer expectations to create a culture shift at top organizations. As a result, this form of digital transformation improves the way work is done within organization. Big organizations are experiencing a culture shift. It also changing the competitive landscape and shifting the expectations of stakeholders and clients that are altering nearly all ways through which organizations operate.
Today, there are three forms of artificial intelligence levels. The first one is the assisted intelligence which involves the use of computer systems to automate basic tasks. The second type is the augmented intelligence. Primarily, this is an AI that learns from human input. As a result, it can make correct assessments based on the AI data that has been fed into the system. The last form of AI is known as autonomous intelligence. This as an Artificial Intelligence system with humans out of the loop (How Artificial Intelligence, 2017). A perfect example of autonomous intelligence is the self-thinking driving cars and autonomous robots.
AI in the workplace
Artificial intelligence is one of the greatest scientific and engineering inventions of all time. It is imperative to note that the possibility of developing machines that can think and perform tasks just like humans creates a number of controversies and ethical concerns from the society. People are concerned that these machines and robots may cause significant threats to human life (Burton, Goldsmith, Koenig, Kuipers, Mattei, Walsh, 2017). Recent dramatic progress in the technology has seen the invention of programs that are able to achieve human acts such as self-driving cars being able to drive themselves on highways, and city streets with an excellent safety record. As a result, these inventions have solicited public reaction and concerns on the potential threats that these machines could pose to humans (Tegmark, n.d.). As such, the integration of artificial intelligence to human life raises a number of ethical questions. These questions include how should AIs behave in our society? (Burton et al., 2017). What should we do is jobs are in short supply? Should AI systems be allowed to kills? Should the society worry about super-intelligence and the singularity? How should society we treat AIs? (Burton et al., 2017).
By and large, the course highlighted the importance of ethics and the issues surrounding the ethical nature of Artificial intelligence. The goal of teaching this ethical concept was to better equip the learner with the understanding these challenges by exposing them to various modes of reasoning and thinking (Bostrom and Yudkowsky, n.d.). As a result, by the end of the lesson, the learner is equipped with the skill to consider a set of problems from different perspectives and consider each problem in the light of different theories. Primarily, the main ethical concern that arises from the use of artificial intelligence is the privacy concern. Privacy regards to the freedom from interference and intrusion. Fundamentally, the Fourth Amendment safeguards and guarantees the right of an individual to be safe in their persons, papers, houses, and effects against any unnecessary searches. The law protects the individual against violation of their privacy and therefore should not be violated and no warrants are to be issued without probable cause. Warrants are only permissible upon probable cause supported by oath and affirmation.
Today, it is generally agreed that AI technology has given rise to various controversies pertaining to issues of invasion of privacy and moral concerns. AI applications such as Siri and Alexa have been known to record private information about people through audio, and can be used by malicious individuals to take advantage of people. As a result, this has brought about the debates as regards to whether or not people can still enjoy their privacy while using AI enabled gadgets. There has also been the aspect of super-intelligence and people are concerned that it may be one of the biggest existential threats of all times (Burton et al., 2017).
Ethical considerations
During the semester, this course emphasized on the importance of Artificial Intelligence in the workplace (Sharma, 2017). At the moment, Artificial Intelligence has been used in the form of digital assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, Facebook’s M and Zuckerberg’s Jarvis (Sharma, 2017). Today, companies like Facebook, Google and Spotify have invested in huge amounts in Artificial Intelligence Development. Additionally, other firms in different industries have also firmly entered into the system are adopting artificial intelligence in their operations.
Artificial Intelligence can play an important role in the workplace. Today, the technique can be used to eliminate bias and lead to a more meritocratic workplace. Over the past few years, various companies have adopted the program in their operations. According to a study by Pegasystems and Marketforce, Artificial Intelligence and automation impacts are much more nuanced, and the program has a positive impact on how employees work (Sharma, 2017). So far, artificial intelligence has proven very useful in the field of selection, recruitment, performance reviews, and remuneration policies. According to the study, Sixty-six percent of the respondents believe that the widespread use of AI will bring about a rise in transparent meritocracy in the workplace (Sharma, 2017). On the other hand, 35 percent believe that the program will result in a reduction in the level of office politics and bias. In their opinion, the decade long arguments about bias and privilege could be resolved by the application of machine learning within organization.
Furthermore, artificial intelligence removes and automates the ordinary and repetitive tasks in the workplace that are inherent in running a business. By and large, artificial intelligence is important in the workplace and has a powerful impact on streamlining the tasks. Furthermore, it is adaptable to various environments and can be applied within a number of departments in a company and across industries (Pedderson, 2018). It helps in asking basic questions and review qualifications, allowing HR team to focus on important aspects such as human interactions and getting to know the candidates better, and on a personal level (Pedderson, 2018). In this regard, artificial intelligence improves the productivity of Human resource managers through automation. Also, it can eliminate some of the risks that arise from human error and bias and allows workers to identify and rectify these issues faster.
The interaction between human resources and artificial in the workplace provides the promise of creating great value to modern organizations. As noted earlier, AI plays an important role in selecting, recruiting, hiring, coaching, and employee service and development. Mainly, this is done through the use of Chatbots. According to a recent survey by ServiceNow that comprised of 350 HR leaders as respondents, 92 percent agreed that the future of offering an improved level of employee service will consist of this program (Meister, 2017). In their opinion, Chatbot is the newest member of the HR team. Mainly, this is due to the fact that the program allows workers to easily get retrieve solution to frequently asked questions. What is more, employees are very comfortable with accessing Chatbots to obtain information whenever they need to make clarifications on various matters at the workplace (Meister, 2017). The type of questions that employees feel comfortable asking using Chatbot range from the general ones to the factual ones. For instance, they ask questions such as how much paid time off do I have left? How do I report sexual harassment and misconduct experience at the workplace? (Meister, 2017).Therefore, the AI technology plays an important role in smoothening the HR and employees experience at the workplace.
The promise of AI in the workforce
In real life, various companies have adopted Artificial Intelligence in the modern workplace. The organization was a law firm that utilized LawGeex. Primarily, LawGeex is an open AI review program that reads and analyses legal contracts. The program is able to read a contract for the company, even if it is a new document that it has never seen before. It can also compare it to a compilation of analogous contracts that it has seen in the past for future reference. It is worth noting that LawGeex functions fully just like real lawyers. Specifically, it remembers what contracts it has seen before in the past for future references. Furthermore, the program plays the role of cloud testing for the company. Thus it is very useful in test automation. My experience with the program has shown that Artificial Intelligence can simplify the work in the workplace, especially for the routine tasks. In this case, it has helped reduce the workload for the law firm by reducing the large quantity of legal documents that the employees of the firm are expected to read and inspect. Therefore, by reading through the contracts on behalf the lawyers at the firm, the workload is significantly reduced. Before the program was introduced and implemented, employees of the firm were forced to read through a significantly large number of documents, sometimes repetitively. The large workload and the repetitive nature of the task would substantially reduce the morale of most workers. However, today, the process has been simplified, thereby boosting the motivation of the employees at the organization. A boost in the morale of the employees at the organization has translated to an increase in worker productivity (Daniel, 2017). Consequently, an increase in worker productivity translates to an increase in business returns and profits.
All in all, the future of artificial intelligence is one of overwhelming dominance and can be useful in decision making. As companies change to keep the pace in the modern economy, AI is developing into a critical asset for organizations by helping them gain an added advantage in today’s highly competitive marketplace. At the moment, there is no custom-made strategy that applies for all companies in implementing Artificial Intelligence within organizations. Therefore, the management of any organization should work towards developing and adopting an artificial intelligence program that works towards making the achievement of the goals and objectives of the firm by making work easier. Artificial Intelligence techniques are continuously extending and enriching decision making support. Decision making support is offered in terms of data delivery, providing forecasts, analyzing data trends, developing data consistency, quantifying uncertainties and suggesting courses of action, among others. Hence, apart from making work easier, artificial intelligence can help in enriching the decision making process.
Real-life examples
Firstly, AI modeling and simulation programs play an important role in marketing decisions. As usual, marketing decision are characterized by multiple complexities. Therefore, the marketing personnel must understand the needs of the customer and align the design of the product to meet the needs and desires of the clientele. It is also vital for the company to have an excellent grasp of the varying consumer behavior in order to make the best decision for the company, both in the long run and the short run. In this regard, AI modeling and simulation helps the company by making reliable insights about the buyer personas. In turn, these methods can be used to envisage customer behavior and modify the services and products offered by the company to suit the needs and desires of the client. Particularly, through the Decision Support System, the AI system is able to support decisions through real-time and up-to-date data gathering, trend analysis and forecasting. Additionally, the AI system enables many automated functions such as data recording, contact management and lead ranking. AI’s buyer persona modeling can also offer predictions of a customer’s lifetime value. What is more, sales and marketing teams can work more productively through these features. In this respect, the artificial intelligence program plays a critical role in decision making process in the marketing field.
In addition, artificial intelligence plays an important role in data assessment and recommendation, which can play a significant role in helping in investment decision making. For instance, hedge fund managers are getting interestingly fascinated by expert systems to trim down errors in investment decision unlike most stock traders who utilize neural systems to predict stock performance through the scrutiny of past data (Daniel, 2017). As a result, they have a greater advantage of getting the best possible predictions and reducing errors in their investment decisions. Thus investment managers who utilize the program get better forecast results on stock prices and help make the best decisions and help them to bid accordingly. In turn, this ensures that a superior investment decision is made, thereby guaranteeing the best results. Therefore, AI is an important tool in the decision making of investment choices.
Furthermore, artificial intelligence has proven to be a useful decision making tool in the healthcare industry. As we learnt in class, the program has undergone advancement over the past few years. As a result, healthcare researchers throughout the world have shown interest in the use of Artificial intelligence to help them save lives. For instance, a simulation model created by researchers at the Indiana University can analyze patient’s historical data and recommend treatment plans. Notably, these predictions and recommendations have been proven to be 50 percent effective at half the cost. In this regard, it is clear that AI has the potential to advance decision making capabilities across various industries. Additionally, it has proven that it can bring down the cost of various decision making processes, while at the same time make the best decisions. Therefore, it is imperative to note that artificial intelligence has over the years developed into critical decision making tools for various professionals.
Also, artificial intelligence paradigms are utilized in copying human actions to support the decision making process even under uncertainties. As such, the program uses symbolic logic, artificial neural network, evolutionary computing, probabilistic reasoning models and Intelligent Agents (Agrawal, Gans, and Goldfard, 2017). In traditional programming methodologies, numerical calculations and explicit logic are provided to help solve problems and make informed decisions about particular matters in business. In accounting, the program has been particularly useful in giving predictions, data consistency, quantifying uncertainty and suggesting the best course of action as regards to a particular matter. As a result, the Artificial Intelligence program plays a critical role in facilitating informed decision making in business.
In the same manner, the car and automotive industry has also become reliant on Artificial Intelligence over the years. As such, many automotive companies have developed several AI applications to help in decision making in sales and marketing. For example, AI has resulted to the development of smarter cars that are well equipped with many sensors that learn and identify patterns. Over the recent past, they have developed the driverless cars. This has been made possible through the installation of add-on safe-drive features that warn drivers of possible road collisions. It is worth noting that these automotive companies use consumer data to determine the likes and desires of their target market, and then capitalize on the findings to make the decision that best suits their potential clients (Sincavage, n.d.). This way, the manufacturer is assured of making the best decision as regards to the products they produce. It is, however, imperative to point out the fact that Artificial Intelligence technology is not the end but only a way to enhance efficiency and effectiveness, improved innovative capabilities and better opportunities for businesses.
Moreover, artificial intelligence helps in decision making through its ability to conduct opinion mining. Primarily, this is a form of data mining that involves searching through online sites for feelings and opinions of people on the web (Sincavage, n.d.). By so doing, companies are able to obtain more information about how their goods or services are perceived by their target market. It is worth noting that manual mining and analysis often take many hours and requires a lot of effort on the part of the company (Artificial Intelligence, n.d.). Therefore, artificial intelligence technology has helped shorten the time and reduced the effort required to perform this important task through reliable analysis and search functions. In turn, the firm can make informed decisions based on the findings made from the opinion mining results, and improve.
Overall, this course enlightens students on the fact that collaborative decision making and knowledge exchange has also been made possible through artificial intelligence. Noteworthy, this concept has been proven useful in difficult clinical health-care decision by incorporating a social context. Specifically, in complex neonatal intensive care units, physicians, parents, nurses and other parties must collaborate to decide whether to initiate, discontinue, limit or continue intensive treatment for an infant. In such cases, the system merges the possible results of the treatment with the perceptions of the parents and the interpretation of the physicians. Therefore, the AI technology offers a channel for communicating complex data in a structured form that is still personalized and customized to facilitate informed decision making.
The course materials also pointed out the fact that artificial intelligence has become an important contribution to the growth of organizations in the modern world. According to recent predictions, artificial intelligence has the ability to develop new sources of growth and reinforce the role of people to drive growth in business (Lohr, 2017). Specifically, artificial intelligence can enhance and drive growth in three different ways. Firstly, it will enhance growth through intelligent automation. Different from the conventional automation solutions, AI-powered innovation can automate complex physical tasks that need agility and adaptation and are capable of self-learning. Secondly, it will enhance growth through labour and capital augmentation (Artificial Intelligence, n.d.). As such, these two factors can be used more effectively as AI allows employees to focus on their best qualities such as innovation, imagination and creation. Lastly, growth can be enhanced through innovation diffusion. As such, artificial intelligence has the ability to propel innovation as it diffuses through the economy (Aghion, Jones and Jones, 2017). In most instances, AI has proven to double down on growth. Mainly, this is achieved through its characteristic to act like a capital-labor hybrid and transcend the current capacity of labor and capital to enhance economic growth. Furthermore, the technology has unprecedented opportunities for value creation (Artificial Intelligence, n.d.).
Furthermore, students discovered from the lesson that artificial intelligence can contribute to growth through the automation of production processes. Over the years, the process of production has been significantly improved. Production has evolved from the industrial revolution when factories used steam, then electricity was invented to automate many production processes (Aghion, 2017). Today, relays, semi-conductors and transistors have continued with the trend and it is expected that artificial intelligence will continue with the system. Already, this has been seen in inventions such as self-driving cars, A.I radiology reports, automobiles engines and MRI machines (Desjardins, 2017). All these machines have proven to make work easier, perform tasks efficiently and provide better results from the processes. Hence, it is safe to say that artificial intelligence results in an increase in the level of productivity within a firm and in an economy, and hence can bring about intensive growth.
Conclusion
All in all, all factors taken into consideration, the course has played an important role in improving the learners’ understanding on the concept of Artificial Intelligence and its application in the modern workplace. In addition, the course brought forward various ethical concerns that arise from the use and implementation of artificial intelligence in the workplace. Besides that, I was able to learn about the importance of artificial intelligence and its applications in the workplace, and how the same technology can be used to drive growth in the workplace. Most importantly, the unit has played an important role in impacting knowledge about how this new technology can be used within organization to improve the overall decision making process.
Reference List
Aghion A., Jones, B., and Jones, C. (2017). Artificial Intelligence and Economic Growth? Stanford University. Retrieved 19 May 2018, https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/AI.pdf
Agrawal, A., Gans, J., and Goldfarb, A. (2017). How AI Will Change the Way We Make Decisions. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved 19 May 2018, https://hbr.org/2017/07/how-ai-will-change-the-way-we-make-decisions
Artificial Intelligence for smarter decision making. Wipro. Retrieved 19 May 2018, https://www.wipro.com/blogs/wipro-insights/artificial-intelligence-for-smarter-decision-making/
Artificial intelligence is the future of growth (n.d.). Accenture. Retrieved 19 May 2018, https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-artificial-intelligence-future-growth
Bostrom, N., and Walsh, T. (2017). The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Retrieved 19 May 2018, https://intelligence.org/files/EthicsofAI.pdf
Burton, E., Goldsmith, J., Koenig., S., Kuipers, B., Koenig, S., Mattei, N., and Walsh, T. (2017). Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence Courses. Retrieved 19 May 2018, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.07769.pdf
Daniel, A. (2017). Artificial Intelligence In The Workplace…What’s it All About? Chatbots Magazine. Retrieved 19 May 2018, https://chatbotsmagazine.com/artificial-intelligence-in-the-workplace-whats-it-all-about-66375b26f7e
Desjardins, J. (2017). AI will have an enormous impact on the future economy. Business Insider. Retrieved 19 May 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/infographic-ai-effect-on-economy-2017-8?IR=T
Lohr, S. (2017). A.I. Will Transform the Economy. But How Much, and How Soon? The New York Times. Retrieved 19 May 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/technology/ai-will-transform-the-economy-but-how-much-and-how-soon.html
Professional Ethics – the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. (2018). Class Presentation
Sincavage, D. (n.d.). How Artificial Intelligence Will Change Decision-Making For Businesses Tenfold. Retrieved 19 May 2018, https://www.tenfold.com/business/artificial-intelligence-business-decisions
Tegmark, M. (n.d.). How Benefits & Risks of Artificial Intelligence. Future of Life. Retrieved 19 May 2018, https://futureoflife.org/background/benefits-risks-of-artificial-intelligence/
Mar, B. (2018). How Artificial Intelligence Is Making Chatbots Better For Businesses. Forbes. Retrieved 19 May 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/05/18/how-artificial-intelligence-is-making-chatbots-better-for-businesses/#323ca1304e72
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