What will be at risk? What would be the opportunities?
The rising popularity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) among businesses and societies is arousing a double-edged sword discourse. Suggested by a recent research conducted by McKinsey: “By 2030, AI could deliver additional global economic output of $13 trillion per year." Yet, if AI algorithms go wrong or training data are miscoded, it could also give rise to unwanted, serious consequences of “privacy violations, discrimination, accidents, and manipulation of political systems”, not to mention the predictive800 million job loss (over a fifth of the global labour force unemployed) by 2030, reported by another McKinsey research conducted in 2017.
While the application of AI in businesses presents immense challenges and opportunities that requires specific cautiousness and restrain, organisations can mitigate the risks of AI applications and deployment by embracing a very basic principle - ‘Humanity’. Author and businessperson Dov Seidman who promotes ethical cultures in business practices highlighted the need to shift current ‘Knowledge Economies’ towards ‘Human Economies’. He made references to real business cases in his 2014 Harvard Business Review article, where argued that the ability to leverage our humanistic strengths like collaborative spirit, passion, character and creativity, will not only be the source of superiority over other competitors but also the intelligent machines. Similar views were found in other researches, generally noting that robotics will unlikely cause massive unemployment for jobs that involve “creativity, expertise, managing people, or those that require frequent social interactions.”
In response to the aforementioned discourse, we sincerely invite you to present and share your views in the 2020 Leadership Forum on Design Education - a concurrent event under the programme of Business of Design Week (BODW).
This Leadership Forum is jointly presented by PolyU Design, Hong Kong Design Institute and Hong Kong Design Centre to bring together renowned leaders from industry and academia for high-level discussions aiming to provide insights to shape the future of design education.
