An open letter to students who want to change the world
Dear students,
As you think about what you want to do with your life, at first, a career in artificial intelligence might not be at the top of your list. When you dream of changing the world, it might be hard to connect the dots between building computer models of human intelligence and eliminating hunger or giving individuals the ability to walk again. Maybe you think you’d have to become a coding pro before you can really start solving problems. Or maybe you can’t envision a career in artificial intelligence because you have never met anyone like you working in AI.
If you have heard anything about AI in the media, it’s probably about autonomous vehicles, gaming, or robots taking over the world. What is less well known is that artificial intelligence is actually solving a broad range of problems from accurately predicting cancer diagnoses by analyzing tissue samples, to rapid response in humanitarian crises using data from social media — and this is just the beginning.
Technology, no matter how powerful, is in the hands of humans. For AI to reach its full potential, we will need to integrate the expertise of scientists, designers, humanists, architects, psychologists, lawyers, data scientists, policy makers, and engineers, just to name a few. All of society — the entire spectrum — needs to be involved.
Today, artificial intelligence is being developed by technologists whose relative lack of diversity does not adequately capture the thinking, experiences, or world-views of society at large. When powerful technology like AI is developed by a small and similar group, it’s difficult for the results to successfully address the wide range of uses.
As AI researchers and educators, we see a future that looks different.
We see a future where farms are more efficient because computer vision is used to sort produce, reducing food waste and feeding more of our expanding population. We see a future where people with physical disabilities can seamlessly navigate the world with assistive technology and robotics. We see a future where the most effective medicine for an individual patient can be determined in a matter of minutes by analyzing the patient’s genes. We see a future where the makeup of AI technologists mirrors the diversity of our society, leading to more creative innovations and applications of artificial intelligence.
But we need your help to make it that way.
This is why we founded AI4ALL.
AI4ALL starts with educational programs that focus on building AI for humanistic applications. We have a summer program for high school students running at Stanford, and are launching programs at Princeton, Carnegie Mellon and UC Berkeley. Our education programs are just the beginning. Bringing high school students together, we have witnessed something much bigger unfolding. When students from all walks of life who share a passion for building world changing technology work intensely side-by-side learning and solving problems together, vibrant alumni communities naturally build and grow far beyond the summer.
These communities will power tomorrow’s innovations. AI will change the world. Who will change AI?
Sincerely,
Olga Russakovsky, Fei-Fei Li, and Rick Sommer (co-founders of AI4ALL)
