Why Human-Centered Design is Critical to AI-Powered Services
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is continuing to advance. And as with all technology, successful implementation needs a human-centric mindset — today more than ever before. But in many AI initiatives, this critical component is missing. Read about why Human-Centered Design critical to succeed in the AI space, and how you can get started.
The excitement of artificial intelligence (AI) continues. We keep hearing grand promises of a complete re-shaping of organizations and society thanks to big data and AI-powered projects. Media reports on new technical advances, and it’s easy to get the feeling that new “artificial minds” are outperforming humans in more and more domains, ranging from healthcare, transportation, logistics, and financial investment, to games and even creativity. At the same time, recent studies estimate that 60% of data-driven and AI projects fail to even launch. And we also hear many concerns about the risks with AI, such as robots taking people’s jobs and how negative bias can spread fake information that can amplify and distort public opinion.
Only by contextualizing and integrating AI, humans, and processes can we achieve the desired impact.
These problems require us to think about AI as “augmentation” or “extension” of human intelligence, rather than AI being self-contained “artificial minds” for automation. In other words, success in this space is not only about data and algorithms. Value is not in the algorithm itself. Value is instead derived from algorithms that have been designed for the context where they should operate. This means that you need to start from the desired impact, and base your AI-driven services in human behavior. You have to realize that the paradox of automation states that humans operating within an AI-augmented context need more skill — not less — to be successful since the ability to manage hand-off and take-over between human and system is complex. Read that again. I’m claiming that successful AI should not aim at replacing human intelligence. If you automate and replace rather than augmenting humans, AI will de-skill workers!
The future of successful AI instead lies in the ability to design for human-machine collaboration. It was concluded by chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov (several years after having…
