Cynthia Breazeal: I think there are count­less amaz­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and its impact on soci­ety. I think one of the areas I’m tru­ly the most excit­ed about is edu­ca­tion. We know that there’s tremen­dous inequity in qual­i­ty of edu­ca­tion world­wide. We know that there are over a bil­lion peo­ple who can’t even read at an ade­quate lev­el, and with the Internet spread­ing they’re going to have lim­it­ed abil­i­ty to access and lever­age the ben­e­fits of the Internet if they can’t read. And with AI there’s the poten­tial for deeply per­son­al­ized learn­ing expe­ri­ences for peo­ple of all ages and stages—even for work­force retrain­ing, right. 

Challenges around that always go to issues of pri­va­cy. So if you’re going to try to cre­ate AIs that deeply under­stand us in order to per­son­al­ize and adapt and opti­mize to us, it’s going to have to learn about us. And of course that is this kind of dove­tail edge to the sword between what should it be learn­ing and adapt­ing to you to ben­e­fit you, and how does it pro­tect your pri­va­cy and your secu­ri­ty so that you’re not put at risk in unin­tend­ed ways? There are many diverse voic­es that need to be a part of that conversation.

In the case of edu­ca­tion, I have a project right now where we’re lever­ag­ing AI and tech­nol­o­gy to bring lit­er­a­cy to the world’s most under-resourced com­mu­ni­ties, inten­tion­al­ly. And there the stake­hold­ers are the chil­dren, the teach­ers, the par­ents. Building a net­work of sci­en­tists and con­tent providers who want to cre­ate tech­nolo­gies that help these pop­u­la­tions. And even­tu­al­ly, gov­ern­ments. Anyone who would even­tu­al­ly become a stake­hold­er of that kind of tech­nol­o­gy. But we are inten­tion­al­ly build­ing a net­work of peo­ple from all those per­spec­tives in order to do that.

We real­ly want to show that AI is not just for those few who can mas­ter this tech­nol­o­gy, but we’re real­ly going to apply this with a human­i­tar­i­an val­ue sys­tem, to say we want to under­stand how to design this tech­nol­o­gy, want to under­stand from work­ing with those stake­hold­ers across all these dif­fer­ent areas how to best inte­grate it. We’re going to learn from that process. Because you’re always going to learn from the process of inte­gra­tion. There’s very few cas­es where you can drop a tech­nol­o­gy into a work­ing human sys­tem and have it just work. It takes time to iter­ate and devel­op, and iter­ate, and learn and learn, and then you final­ly come to solu­tions that work.

And if we’re cre­at­ing AI for human beings, we’d appre­ci­ate the expanse of human experience—how we think, how we learn, how we make deci­sions, what mat­ters to us, to design tech­nol­o­gy to sup­port those values.