Dr. Jerry Smith Offers his Insights at POLITICO’s AI Summit

Photo Credit: Rod Lamkey Jr. for POLITICO

“Everyone open up Google on your computer or your iPhone and search ‘grandpa’, then click images. What do you see?” began Dr. Jerry Smith, Vice President of Data Sciences and Artificial Intelligence, at a recent summit on artificial intelligence (AI) hosted by POLITICO, an American political journalism company.

Dr. Smith examined the bias behind AI speaking to more than 275 policy makers, business leaders and experts who gathered to explore the impact of AI on businesses, government and society as a whole. In his speech, Dr. Smith contends that data is the historical debris of human activity, and is thus biased by nature. Consequently, the question becomes how do you have responsible AI? How do you build systems ethically, and ensure that they subsequently run ethically?

“At Cognizant, we believe in rehumanizing AI,” said Dr. Smith. “Understanding the relationship between inputs and outputs is the easy part of AI. If we stop there, we don’t get to the heart what remains of society—the human being. Don’t stop at the data, don’t stop at the easy part. Start to think about what it means to be human and the cognitive reasons we do what we do.”

Click here to see Dr. Smith’s full remarks as well as other speakers from the event.