Self-driving cars are cool, but 鈥� especially in a COVID world 鈥� they鈥檙e not the last word in getting around town.
鈥淲hat if instead of opening the newspaper every morning to see what the current infection rates are, you were able to open an app that told you 鈥� on your block, between where you live and the grocery store 鈥� the data you need to know to make decisions about getting from here to there, today?鈥�
Explore more of our programming from this year's virtual event:
- Still More Programming from Academic Festival 2020: How Did We Ever Do This All in One Day?
- It Was All 精东影业 Access, Equity and Justice: TC’s Academic Festival focused on solutions to problems ‘decades in the making’
- Unwelcome in Chechnya: At Academic Festival, a discussion of global violence toward the LGBTQ community
- Exploring Poverty’s Impact on Learning: Neuroscience & Education Student Gabriel Reyes won this year's Student Research Poster competition
- Haves vs. Have Nots: Can Higher Education Bridge the Widening Gap?
- Looking Past the Numbers: Social Justice Award recipient Rob Gore talks about preventing Violence to help youth of color be “at their best”
With that scenario, (M.A. '96), Chief Innovation Officer for Citi (heading the Citi Ventures and Citi Productivity teams), deftly encapsulated her vision for moving beyond artificial intelligence to 鈥渁rtificial enlightenment鈥� 鈥� tools that enable more effective decision-making 鈥渨ith the information we need at that moment, in context, in the situation that we鈥檙e in.鈥�
Addressing a virtual audience at TC鈥檚 2020 Academic Festival, Colella, who has spoken on the same topic at the World Economic Forum at Davos, explained that since 1965, when the term 鈥渁rtificial intelligence鈥� (AI) was coined, technology has been built to mimic human thinking. The guiding premise has been that 鈥渢he world is full of massive amounts of data, and the way we have to consume that data in order for our brains to handle it is to summarize it, so that rather than understand millions of points of information, we really only have to deal with a couple.鈥� The past 10 years, in particular, have seen an influx of powerful computational tools of this kind, to the point that today, Colella said, 鈥渆very single second of every single day, 127 new devices get added to the Internet.鈥�
TC Talks | From Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Enlightenment by Vanessa Colella
But the problem with AI, she said, is that 鈥渆very time that we aggregate data, we make it easier for us to understand what that information is and more difficult to understand the nuance underneath the information.鈥�
For example: 鈥淭hink about how many times you鈥檝e looked at the unemployment statistics this year. Certainly, we know that job dislocation has been something that we never could have predicted. But the aggregate number doesn鈥檛 really help you, right? It doesn鈥檛 tell you much about whether you have a job and can feed and care for your family in the place that you live.鈥�
Every time that we aggregate data, we make it easier for us to understand what that information is and more difficult to understand the nuance underneath the information.
鈥� Vanessa Colella (M.A. '96), Chief Innovation Officer for Citi
At Citi, Colella said, the focus is on investing in technologies that augment, rather than simply mimic, human intelligence for everyone from rescue workers to consumers.
As for self-driving cars, Colella isn鈥檛 knocking them. But she did offer one telling comment:
鈥淭he reality is that it probably takes seven years to teach a car whether it can cross the street. I can teach my seven-year-old whether to cross the street in 30 seconds.鈥�
[Read a profile of Vanessa Colella that appeared in TC Today magazine.]
[Watch other installments of the TC Talks series delivered at Academic Festival 2020 by Val Ackerman, Commissioner of the NCAA's Big East Conference, and Sandra Kapell (M.A. 鈥�93), Executive Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer of Madison Square Garden Entertainment Corporation.]