UX is now AX
If we want AI to increase human agency, add convenience, preserve privacy, develop trust and be more personalized, designers who understand the new rules of AX will have a huge advantage.
May 18, 2020
Starter kit: How to know if your organization is ready for AI
Leaders and talent management professionals need to understand AI because successful integration relies on people. This will be especially true post-COVID19 as economies and organizations recover. As an HR professional or talent manager, how can you assess AI readiness in your organization? To answer this question, we put together a talent development readiness kit for AI.
May 2, 2020
Adapting to a Level 3 workplace: Workshops and experiential learning in COVID
Now, with everyone at home—remote, virtual, distributed—there’s a new challenge to add to the list; how to maintain productivity, engagement and learning. We’ve been working to get all our workshops and learning journeys at Level 3; adaptation.
May 1, 2020
How to be fair with AI in Hiring: Equality and Ethics in the Age of COVID
The coronavirus crisis is accelerating the adoption of AI-powered systems to recruit, evaluate, track and onboard employees. As our societies adjust to the shock of the crisis, likely including several cycles of self-isolation over the coming months, coronavirus is accelerating several prominent future-of-work trends. One of the most important is the use of automated hiring systems.
April 29, 2020
How To Think About AI and Work, Post COVID-19
When work is unpredictable, humans win. The coronavirus emergency is showing how the best artificial intelligence augments, rather than replaces, human skills.
April 29, 2020
Why we spent a week on designing a couple-centered problem solving system for COVID
Developing this process—including testing it—took us week of hard work. But we think it’s been worth it. We discovered that it’s possible to innovate on the process itself. We discovered that there are many ways to bring in people’s experience and the experience of the experts. And we discovered things about ourselves as individuals and as a couple. We were able to bring in work from AI design too—the vital ingredients in any intelligent system: personal agency, autonomy and choice.
April 27, 2020
How to build AI that humans want
Artificial intelligence is a new way to tell computers what people want. This means there are new requirements for design. Design has to take into account a whole host of new ideas — from telling computers about the values of individual and society to allowing individual users to provide feedback to a machine in a personally meaningful way, dynamically, in real-time.
April 24, 2020
How to design human—centered, not human—futures, AI
Human-centered AI design must be the way forward. If AI design is untempered by human concerns for fairness, equity, justifiability and human accountability, if it only optimizes for one thing (profit), or if it is solely designed to create a future-you rather than understanding the future-you, then we all lose—especially in our authentic connections with others.
April 24, 2020
Human-centered AI design is now all in one place with Sonder Scheme Studio. Making AI design easier, more inclusive, more ethical and more human.
Sonder Scheme today announced a new product, Sonder Scheme Studio. Sonder Scheme Studio is a complete system for designing human-centered artificial intelligence and offers a new way for designers, product managers, software developers and technology ethicists to design AI.
April 20, 2020
Facebook looks to radioactive tracing as a way to reduce bias in AI
Facebook has released research into a new technique called “radioactive data.” The technique is analogous to the use of radioactive markers in medicine.
March 30, 2020
How people react to over-personalization
We are all individuals – we all have a sense of a unique core identity. We are not interchangeable. It is this truth that lies at the heart of problematic over-personalization.
March 28, 2020
How to map human and machine roles
Once you’ve figured out the problem you want to solve and that AI is the right way to go, the next step is to figure out how to apply AI. It’s important to understand whether AI should replace what a human does (which can reduce time spent on monotonous tasks and free people up) or whether AI should enhance what a person does by making it easier to do a task
March 18, 2020
How humans judge machines
Understanding how humans judge machine decisions before systems are designed will be an important skill and step in the process.
March 18, 2020
Developers who turn to AI suffer from “imposter syndrome”
AI is “cool and interesting” for engineers and developers but those who try to learn how to build AI can become frustrated and suffer from imposter syndrome according to new research.
March 18, 2020
Scientists studying emotional expression now study faces in context so AI designers should too
Understanding the science of emotions is important for AI designers. Failing to understand the full complexity, nuance and variability of emotional expression risks both bias and avoidance. People will easily be able to outsmart an AI by faking expressions.
March 6, 2020
AI’s natural language frontier – context is king but just how big will models get?
The world of natural language AI has changed significantly in a relatively short space of time – the shift to transformer architectures. Beyond this shift, there appears to be a bifurcation in approach.
February 28, 2020
Primer: attention, transformers and the new architecture of language
Natural language is one of the most important challenges in AI. And things have moved rapidly over the past few years. This primer will help you get to grip with you the basic concepts in a (mostly) non-technical way.
February 28, 2020
Primer: how machines learn representations in data
When there’s too much information, reducing the amount of information – simplifying the data – can reveal more. This idea is foundational to understanding how new architectures are being used in natural language processing.
February 28, 2020
If you use Alexa, you might want to keep your pants on
As anyone knows who uses an AI voice assistant, such Alexa, Siri, Cortana or OK Google, the wake word isn’t the only thing that triggers a response. In the case of Amazon’s Echo, the phrase “my pants on” has a high chance of waking the device, risking accidentally recording the conversation and sharing it with Amazon.
February 25, 2020
Why all AI design should include power mapping
An effective way to understand how power is enacted in an AI system is start with a power mapping exercise -to think more about “studying up” and looking at those who have the most agency and autonomy.
February 25, 2020
Here’s the reason why you can never design the perfect explanation from an AI
New research reveals a basic power imbalance that is not easily remedied: given the informational position of the designer, there is simply no way to fully maintain commitment to a user’s autonomy.
February 21, 2020
How to think about Personalization and not Over-personalize
Personalization is a core promise of AI but there is a core tension at play – how to personalize without reducing people’s ability to decide for themselves.
February 14, 2020
How giving yourself up to AI is an existential problem
In a techno-social economy, as more human problems are subject to computation, human-centered AI will be AI that ultimately keeps humans in control.
January 29, 2020
How to avoid facial recognition
We recommend a handy series of decision trees from the California Sunday Magazine.
January 24, 2020
Data scientists can over-trust explainability tools and put AI in production too soon
Explainability and transparency are critical performance criteria for AI systems. Bias and fairness are increasingly top-of-mind, which raises the stakes on AI developers to be able to interrogate and understand their models. New research raises concerns about how these tools are being used in practice. Researchers find failures with the use of explainability tools.
January 16, 2020
How to use an AI ethics checklist
Many organizations have developed AI ethics principles which are meant to help guide developers of AI systems. But abstract principles can be difficult to operationalize so, in response, some organizations have moved to using AI ethics checklists.
January 10, 2020
Would you believe AI can now tell a “liar’s walk”?
New research claims to have developed AI that’s capable of detecting deception by looking at gait and gesture. This is potentially a goldmine for the AI surveillance community. But we can also see the danger. Specifically, how the seeds of bad AI can happen very early on in the development.
December 20, 2019
If we want to stop human downgrading, we need a new paradigm for AI
According to Tristan Harris, the director and a co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, technology (and by association, AI) is operating under the wrong paradigm.
December 19, 2019
Six must-do steps to make AI transformation successful
AI adoption is increasing but AI-at-scale is not. These six must-do steps help to close the gap.
December 19, 2019
Facebook develops empathetic AI for better private chats
Facebook AI research has released a new dataset and benchmarks for training emotionally-aware chat systems.
December 13, 2019
AI leaders achieve outsize results with these core practices
It’s that time of year again and McKinsey has updated their global survey on AI adoption and practice. This survey is valuable because it focuses on the relative competitive position of companies using AI. There are two types of company now – those that lead in AI and those that lag.
December 10, 2019
According to AI, the world, and almost everything in it, are “his”
If you’re a native English speaker, you may not have consciously realized that masculine and feminine pronouns are not grammatically the same as each other. This matters because AI – specifically large, open, shared AI language models – have an important, inherent gender bias simply because of a quirk in the English language. In a
November 26, 2019
Three ways Siri is getting better
Three interesting ideas in Apple’s research on Siri, and voice assistants in general. They are all incremental steps on the path to the holy grail of voice – an assistant that understands the user’s intent.
November 23, 2019
So what happened with the AI behind Apple Card?
Apple and Goldman Sachs have been tweet stormed this week. Now Goldman is under investigation by the NYDFS and Apple’s brand is tarnished. None of this needed to happen. Here’s our initial conclusions and questions all leaders should ask of their AI product teams and data scientists.
November 13, 2019
15 things to know about Apple Card
After Steve Wozniak’s reply to Dave’s tweet was picked up by @CNN, we put some thoughts together in a long series of tweets.
November 13, 2019
Ethics and governance in AI at the House of Beautiful Business, Lisbon 2019
Here I’ve published my workshop opener from the House of Beautiful Business’s fabulous 2019 event in Lisbon. We have a problem in AI – on one hand we have engineers, AI scientists and researchers who understand and drive the technology. This gives us a techno-centric view of the solutions. They wrestle with such things as
November 11, 2019
Apple Card, Goldman Sachs and sexist artificial intelligence
Apple may have inadvertently exposed sexism in the credit card business. Even the best companies in the world with the best experience with AI will stumble as Apple and Goldman Sachs are now. The question for all is: how will you create an AI governance program to manage your machine employees?
November 10, 2019
Google set out to design more energy efficient AI but may have found something even better
Neuroscience and artificial intelligence have multiple intersection points. There are many examples of discoveries in neuroscience and psychology which provide inspiration for AI researchers, as well as the other way around. It’s a mutually reinforcing cycle as AI researchers adapt biological structures to machine architectures while neuroscientists and psychologists learn to apply various AI techniques
October 15, 2019
If you want your teen off Snapchat, get them to watch this video
A dark humor interactive video designed to capture (literally) your attention and showcase how popular social media apps can use facial emotion recognition technology to make decisions about your life, promote inequalities, and even destabilize democracy made its debut this week. It’s particular targeted at teens and young people who use Snapchat and Instagram.
October 9, 2019
Artificial intelligence surveillance is basically everywhere
A fascinating new report details just how expansive the use of artificial intelligence surveillance is around the world. In a report released on 17 September, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace outlines the global expansion of AI surveillance, the vast majority of it being rolled out since 2017. According to the report, “startling developments keep
September 28, 2019
Six books Silicon Valley leaders should read before it’s too late
It feels like the start of a tech backlash. Or at least, a mid-course correction. A backlash against design that manipulates our predictable cognitive weaknesses, disrupts our attention spans and creates new forms of psychological suffering. A backlash against the constant gaming of our mental models of technology. A backlash against predictive algorithms that infer
September 28, 2019
OpenAI’s hide and seek is more than just a game
OpenAI – the AI research group, originally founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman and now heavily backed by Microsoft – has released some truly groundbreaking AI using reinforcement learning techniques in a multi-agent game of hide and seek. Games showcase important theoretical advances in AI, but putting too much weight on how an AI
September 21, 2019
The battle for AI supremacy between China and the US – what you need to know
Trump’s trade war has overshadowed the other battle – supremacy in AI. After China’s State Council released a national strategy for AI development in July 2017, there was a race to understand what this would mean. Both China and AI are difficult enough to comprehend on their own. Many interpretations made at that time have
September 17, 2019
The science of emotions isn’t keeping up with AI so this is what you can do
There’s a common view that we can infer how someone feels from how they look. AI that automates this and then applies the knowledge to tasks is growing in popularity. But now we know that use of the technology is way ahead of the science.
September 17, 2019
DIY your next innovation workshop with our Opportunity Sprint for AI toolkit
AI strategy starts with getting people empowered, confident and creative about AI: so they can see the opportunity for themselves and start innovating in ways they haven’t before. Our in-person facilitation and Opportunity Sprint does this, but now you can do it yourself.
August 22, 2019
Make your next executive offsite, an AI innovation workshop
Are you a facilitator or business leader who needs a practical way to develop, or refresh, an innovation, marketing or operations strategy? It’s time to take a focused look at AI and make your next executive offsite an AI innovation workshop.
August 21, 2019
How to make ethical AI without stymying technologists
Many companies implementing AI have done so with rapid adoption of sophisticated technologies. This has lead to technologists – data scientists, AI researchers and engineers – being far ahead of the rest of the business. Leaders are having to answer the question “is your AI ethical?”
August 19, 2019
Move
AI that enables more sophisticated robotics and transport will not only affect jobs but also our broader social systems; changing cities and affecting the entire manufacturing, logistics and transport infrastructure.
August 14, 2019
Make
Design is being revolutionized. AI is enabling not only more efficient designs but truly novel constructions.
August 14, 2019
Feel
Emotional AI measures, understands, simulates and reacts to human emotions and provides for more natural relationships between humans and machines.
August 14, 2019
Talk
If machines can reliably interact with humans in natural language, the way we interact with technology fundamentally changes.
August 14, 2019
See
AI is learning to see. Image data is increasingly available to machines which means that there are entirely new ways of using computers to help humans in the real world – extending reality and giving us new eyes.
August 14, 2019
Know
AI can do more than analyze and make predictions. As AI becomes increasingly specialized at a task, it can be more certain of what it knows, which enables humans to use AI to seek knowledge and truth.
August 14, 2019
Think
AI’s most recognized application is advanced analytics across new data sources, such as unstructured text or the internet itself. AI’s speed, scale and scope has completely changed the game as to what’s possible.
August 14, 2019
Why a workshop for AI works
A workshop remains the gathering of choice for most leaders, particularly when there’s a need to prioritize opportunities or to align on change leadership. This is especially valuable when a company needs to figure out its AI strategy.
August 11, 2019
How to know if AI should automate or augment
It’s important to understand whether AI should replace what a human does (which can reduce time spent on monotonous tasks and free people up) or whether AI should enhance what a person does by making it easier to do a task, making task completion more powerful or add to the skills of the individual.
August 11, 2019
Everyone hates facial recognition because virtually no one designs it for trust
Facial recognition technology need not be a surveillance and privacy disaster. But it’s been designed and deployed in ways that do not increase trust and address fundamental human desire for choice and control.
August 10, 2019
OpenAI may have sold its soul but at least it sold it to Microsoft
OpenAI’s initial non-profit status provided some optimism that its technologies would be broadly beneficial for society. But the organization’s transition to a for profit entity and Altman’s new role as CEO exposes questions about the company’s governance.
July 27, 2019
The five components of AI best practice are about people
The biggest thing slowing down successful AI deployments is people: the absence of skills and employee resistance.
July 23, 2019
How to know if AI is the right solution
When designing an AI system, the most important questions aren’t whether to build on Tensorflow or AWS, the most important questions are about your users.
July 23, 2019
AI accuracy is confusing for most people
AI is incredible technology, something that would have been the stuff of science fiction only a few years ago. The problem is science fiction has also provided people with plenty of images of an AI surveillance dystopia. It’s hard to convey exactly how these systems work if designers only talk in probabilities.
July 18, 2019
Six things to look for in an AI course
Understanding AI is a critical skill for the future so finding the right AI course is an important choice. Here’s six key questions to ask when you are looking an AI training course.
July 16, 2019
Memo to CEOs from a former Morgan Stanley analyst: how seriously are you taking this AI thing?
AI is hot. 88% of senior leaders agree that AI will help their business be more competitive. But, 58% of businesses say that less than 10% of their company’s digital budget goes towards AI. So, it’s not surprising that only 15% of AI projects succeed. This disconnect comes as no surprise to us. I was
July 14, 2019
Augmentation vs automation
Here’s a video of Helen talking about augmentation vs automation, what humans are good at vs what machines are good at and the templates we’ve developed to help you work through these topics. Click on the image below to download the template. Try it out and let us know what you think at hello@sonderscheme.com.
July 11, 2019
Try these team exercises to be inspired about what’s possible with AI
The most advanced companies today understand the scale of AI’s potential impact. They aren’t ignoring AI and they aren’t just following the herd and with a simple, linear solution. Instead, they are evaluating their business problems from new perspectives.
July 10, 2019
If you’re going to collect data, use it like Stitch Fix
The retail industry, while collecting a ton of customer segmentation data on websites, is lagging in deploying this data to personalize a feed for a customer. This matters because the ability to magically show a customer something that they love increases loyalty. Only a quarter of specialty retailers actually deploy the data they collect to personalize the customer experience.
July 10, 2019
Recommended reading, listening, references and credits
We read, listen, watch and discuss with many. It’s simply impossible to include every person, podcast, video, book, paper, article we’ve touched, but we would like to acknowledge some specific expertise as well as include reading follow up for those who want to go deeper.
July 8, 2019
The psychological phenomenon that every AI product designer needs to understand
Designing for feedback and co-learning between human and machine is complex, experimental and counter-intuitive. In the case of nudging, consumers – and likely employees too – don’t take long to get wise to it.
July 5, 2019
Google’s AI is getting better at dialogue, just in time for the cloud wars
In the voice wars, context will be king. But computational efficiency matters — especially for Google which wants to be able to link the online and offline worlds, can’t position for privacy like Apple’s Siri or be always on wifi like Amazon’s Alexa devices. A true consumer, mobile, cross-platform, ad-driven experience will require both approaches to be equal priority.
July 4, 2019
Why Pinterest is an AI powerhouse
In the world of AI, context and intent are very difficult for machines to learn. What Pinterest has achieved is impressive because they are unique in their ability to serve up a personalized and contextually relevant visual experience, at scale and at speed.
July 4, 2019
AI will have a “game changing” affect on discrimination
AI will represent a fundamental challenge to anti-discrimination regimes that seek to limit discrimination. Because AI uses training data to look for correlations that are predictive of an output with no theory or intuition from a human, it will naturally seek out proxies for genuinely predictive characteristics.
June 21, 2019
This is how people like machines to explain themselves
Core to human-centered AI is explainability. If a machine cannot explain its reasoning in a way that humans understand and on human terms, the AI isn’t working for people. Researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology, Cornell University and the University of Kentucky recently published the results of teaching a machine to generate conversational explanations of
June 17, 2019
For professionals, managers or sales and marketers, companies buy AI to enhance humans
The headlines still talk about AI job Armageddon; widespread job loss through AI and automation because AI is faster and better at everything humans can do. But emerging evidence tempers concerns about machines replacing professional work. Commercial AI applications offered by startups are being bought for enhancing human capabilities rather than replacing humans, according to
May 26, 2019
AI should account for what humans want
If there is no incentive or opportunity for humans to be creative and figure out what the AI can’t do as well and act accordingly, then the AI is also unable to be used to its best economic advantage.
May 25, 2019
AI needs humans for the “last mile”
Designers need to understand how new knowledge is created in a system if they are to design an AI system that replaces humans in routine and predictable tasks but still requires humans for critical tasks.
May 25, 2019
AI that’s too fast will discourage people
While it may be tempting to design such robots for optimal productivity, engineers and managers need to take into consideration how the robots’ performance may affect the human workers’ effort and attitudes toward the robot and even toward themselves.
May 25, 2019
If an AI assistant disappoints, people give up
People come to voice assistants with especially high expectations. They rapidly abandon exploring new functionality and simply stick with what was successful the first time around.
May 25, 2019
People like advice from AI
AI must work in tandem with a professional’s desire to use his or her years of experience and sit comfortably with their intuition rather than go up against it
May 25, 2019
Aligning technical practice with human-centered AI design
Human-centered AI design is different. To fully appreciate how speed, scale and scope of AI materially alter the standard design process, we have tailored our Sprints for AI development needs, to help technical and non-technical people come together, so that they can make better AI-enabled products, faster.
May 25, 2019
Look to AI for the future of job crafting
If there is no incentive or opportunity for humans to be creative and figure out what the AI can’t do as well, then humans can’t use the AI to its best economic advantage.
May 17, 2019
Design more valuable AI by understanding how humans think
For AI designers, there is one cognitive bias that is particularly important; it’s called the representative heuristic.
May 16, 2019
Is AI a solution looking for a problem?
The most advanced companies today understand the scale of AI’s potential impact. They are evaluating their business problems from new perspectives. They are using the inspiration of how others are solving problems with AI to find new problems. They understand that AI’s solutions allow them to address problems they couldn’t before.
May 16, 2019
Not all AI is good enough to increase productivity
The traditional view of automation and labor is that automation increases the value of labor by increasing the productivity of a chain of tasks. Now that more machine learning-based AI has been deployed in more places, what’s really happening is more nuanced.
May 15, 2019
Human-centered AI design for HR executives
Human-centered AI design makes it possible to bring in deciders—HR professionals and managers—so that they can experiment and tune the system as often as required, ultimately always having control over configuring the AI to find people in ways that truly reflect the diversity of human performance but still offering the efficiencies required.
May 13, 2019
Human-centered AI for product managers and innovators
For product managers and innovators, there are many new things to consider when designing relationships with customers and AI.
May 13, 2019
Why Sprint AI?
Design sprints are the hands-down best way of getting started and making early and rapid progress on a messy, upfront, ambiguous design problem. We customized them to make them work even better for AI.
May 13, 2019
How Machines Learn — A non-expert guide to artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is one of the most important technologies of our time. AI is everywhere – it is a technology that is diffusing through everything and it touches our lives every day. This is because we are increasingly governed by our digital selves and AI powers the digital world. We have spent years researching AI.
May 13, 2019
Why human-centered AI design matters
Human-centered AI design goes beyond user interface design; it takes account of the broader implications of AI, including accountability for mistakes, ethics, bias and governance. It considers an AI to be an active agent with a distinct intelligence that it’s the responsibility of humans to design.
May 13, 2019
Announcing Sonder Scheme
We created Sonder Scheme to help people develop AI for humans. Our goal is to help people make better AI; AI that serves people, augments our relationships and uses this powerful technology well to advance our species.
May 13, 2019
AI is changing strategy, competition and our time.
So far there have been two major eras in the history of computing. The first was the era of the PC from mid 70s to mid 90s. This was the heyday of IBM and then of Microsoft as they started to take over the world. This was the beginning of the desktop world with computers
May 1, 2019