LatinX in AI — Town Hall Quick Recap
On January 30th, LatinX in Artificial Intelligence held our first-ever Town Hall meeting. Over forty people came to share their thoughts and feedback about Artificial Intelligence and the impact it has on the Latinx community. We greatly appreciate their time, input and effort.
We had various speakers and special guests share their work in the space along with their thoughts. Some of the talks we had include Intel Labs, Udacity, AI4All, and Deep Racing. Check out photos here!
Omar Florez, PhD previously with Intel Labs, now with Capital One, presented his talk on “Learning to Hash” the innovative approach to Hash Neural Networks.
Luis Serrano, PhD from Udacity highlighted the importance of education in the era of Artificial Intelligence or as he described it “the next renaissance,” where Udacity is driving towards Portfolio based education, rather than resume.
Another item he shared was the feeling of ‘Imposter Syndrome,’ not being able to internalize one’s accomplishments in fear of being exposed as a fraud. I sympathize with this because when there are not many folks who are Latinx in the industry, one may feel this way.
Cezanne Camacho, also from Udacity, spoke regarding education and the future of work.
One of my favorite quotes from our town hall was “Deep learning is not that hard, it’s data management” from Carlos Uranga.
Carlos is an entrepreneur and Data Engineer. His latest work includes the launch of his new venture, DeepRacing, which optimizes performance and cost of small scale autonomous vehicles.
Tess Posner, Executive Director of AI4All shared her perspective and the mission of AI4All.
Ed Felten, PhD, Professor at Princeton and Former White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer shared insights about the industry and government initiatives.
Our last event at the Town Hall was an open discussion on Artificial Intelligence.
What’s really pressing for you? Are you afraid of AI? What do you know about it? How is it going to affect you in the future?
An attendee named Martin, shared that before coming to this event he had no idea what Artificial Intelligence was. One thought he had was that ‘when something is uncomfortable or different, it is easier to resist. He wondered ‘how can we be more open to the unknown and change that mentality?’ This is a great example of why we want to bring more awareness to the community.
Jessica believes that we can see AI not from the “terminator perspective” but as something that can help people become more efficient in their jobs.
What do you know about Self-driving cars/trucks? The effects of AI in the trucking industry
Marcos, shared the story of his father as a truck driver and truck driving business owner. He had the oversight to see that trucking was oversaturated and many immigrants/relatives were coming from Mexico to become truck drivers. AI will no doubt disrupt the industry with self-driving trucks and Marcos hopes that we can help truck drivers transition from a driving role to a more administrative/operations role when these trucks become common place.
Juan Manuel shared the story of his family immigrating from Colombia to New York and his father’s first job as a taxi driver. Uber and Lyft are disrupting that industry as well as investing in self-driving cars. In addition with white-collar jobs, Juan Manuel, as a Latino does not see many colleagues who look like him. We need our community to get involved and educated so they can be a part of this space as well.
Ed Felten, PhD shared that numbers wise, there are 3 million drivers (About 1.5% of the US Workforce) in the US with the majority being long haul truck drivers. It is a big deal when those people are affected by automation. Research estimates 1 million drivers will transition to a similar job. A school bus driver for example, they drive the bus and take care of the kids. Once autonomous buses are in place, we’ll still need someone to watch the kids during their commute to school. That job will change but it won’t go away. Out of those 3 million jobs, 2 million are likely to go away, in a world where self-driving cars would fully deploy.
It is a matter of job churn rather than job loss. One thing that surprised him was how much job churn there already was in the economy aside from this. About 2 Million jobs go away and 2.2 million jobs are created.
The Effects of AI in Retail
In regards to retail innovations such as Amazon’s new Amazon GO, Daisy believes that human-to-human connection is important for customers and their shopping experience. Therefore, some jobs will not go away because of that.
Ed Felten, PhD commented on National Strategy on AI and the economy: ‘You start with the question of whether we should take policy action to lead to a more equal distribution of the economy’s resources and whether we are willing to spend money and move money to make it happen. The hard part is how. Is it a UBI, subsidizing wages or changing our tax policy?’
Abiud, an attendee and Public Policy Consultant believes that for job displacement, people should be able to earn a stipend to train and educate ourselves for the transition to a new job.
There’s no doubt that for the Latinx community there are many barriers to entering the space and issues that we will encounter.
The mission of our coalition is to “Create Harmony Between AI and the Latinx Community.” One of those ways is through education.
Please come join us at our next event at the Impact Hub on Saturday, March 17th for an Introduction to Machine Learning workshop with Tairi Delgado from Udacity.
Registration: https://intro-ml-lxai.eventbrite.com
If you are interested in learning more or would like to get involved, please don’t hesitate to reach me at sebganaya@gmail.com and visit our website latinxinai.org.
A special thank you to Impact Hub for hosting, our speakers and my team for making this event possible!
Ally & Sponsor Links
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LatinX in AI Coalition Mission:
Creating Harmony Between AI and the Latinx Community
- Increase representation of Latinx in Artificial Intelligence
- Improve access to education and resources in AI engineering to latinx community
- Improve awareness of the long and short term effects of artificial intelligence technology on the Latinx community
- Increase communication between AI companies, engineers, researchers and the Latinx community
- Ensure transparency and accuracy of latinx culture and voice in data representation
Do you identify as latinx and are working in artificial intelligence or know someone who is latinx and is working in artificial intelligence? Add to our directory: http://bit.ly/LatinXinAI-Directory-Form
Check out our open source website: http://www.latinxinai.org/
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Thanks to Laura Montoya.
