By Jack Cumming
Grappling with artificial intelligence (AI) and the related question of how AI should be regulated brings one face-to-face with the obvious challenge of change in senior living. AI and AI-enabled devices offer much promise for the aged. Japan is far ahead of the United States, both in recognizing this reality and in putting automation into service. Japan had no choice. Change there was driven by demographics, and those demographics are coming our way.
Aristotle
Recently, I was reading an academia paper by John Kontos of the University of Athens. That’s Athens in Greece, not Georgia. As you might expect of a Greek steeped in the classics of Western thought, Professor Kontos refers to a time when human intelligence, reasoning, was as fresh as artificial intelligence is today.
“… In ‘Prior Analytics’ (4th century B.C.),” Professsor Kontos tells us, “… Aristotle is apparently the first thinker to describe a mechanism of deduction by the human brain. This constitutes an early introspective act of science,” he continues, “that paves the way to Machine Consciousness …”.
Aristotle is often credited as the father of Western logic. Logic is the foundation of today’s artificial intelligence. The reference to Western reasoning refers to the contrast of European intellectual history with its Asian counterpart. Confucian logic, particularly in its early forms, was more focused on ethical principles, social harmony, and practical wisdom than on formal deductive reasoning [Source].
AI Analogy
That distinction is central to understanding the AI phenomenon and to understanding its potentialities and limitations. Those understandings are crucial for senior living and, especially, for industry leaders – CEOs, their advisers, and analysts. In an interview at Harvard Business School, Oren Etzioni, an AI expert, warns that the resistance of AI adherents to sound regulatory standards may ultimately prove detrimental to their business interests.
He goes on to state that it is the responsibility of the very top corporate leadership to master an understanding of AI and to ensure that it best serves all corporate stakeholders. We can add that in senior living, it is similarly a responsibility of top leadership to help fashion proactive regulation to make the industry a trusted solution to old age challenges and to ensure that senior living enterprises best serve all stakeholders.
Logic Isn’t Creative
That brings us back to Aristotle and what AI is and isn’t. Logic is central to Western thought and culture, but it is not creative. Logic can only be used to test creative thinking for its reasonableness. Similarly, AI is a creation of that Western culture, and it, too, is not directly creative. AI responds to human prompts and is no more than a power tool to help free the most creative, most practical human minds from some of the drudge work of giving form to their best ideas.
Most readers will have seen the ability of AI to respond to prompts. Type in a request, say, for a presentation on a topic, and AI spits out a seemingly plausible presentation ready for review. Nevertheless, a human has to point the AI assistant toward the context and direction for the presentation.
Readers also likely have read of the ability of AI to create computer code that can perform a desired task. Here, too, AI is only a talented assistant, but a human creator has to specify the specifics of what the computer module is to accomplish.
Secretarial Intelligence (SI)
It makes me think of the days early in my career when men dominated business and were supported by predominantly female secretaries and clerical staff. Those men would often boast that they didn’t know how to do this or that because their underlings took care of such trivial matters. The men occupied their time with wheeling and dealing. They were important. That, of course, changed when women demonstrated their prowess and men learned to type.
It’s the same today when CEOs rely on others to have the knowledge and decision authority for emerging opportunities concerning such matters as AI or sensible regulation. In doing so, like those “suits” of yore, today’s executives often show themselves to be anachronistic. That should signal that it’s time for them to get up-to-date or to step aside in favor of younger talent.
People vs. (or with) Automation
Much ink is spilled about the workforce challenge in senior living. AI robotics offers a possible solution. Senior living is a people business, resistant to compelling logic and automation. That leaves us with big questions: Will today’s senior living industry adapt to the changing demographics and resource strains ahead? If not, will a different industry emerge to supplant today’s solutions as those strains escalate? Will there still be a need for age-restricted solutions, or will aging in the future be treated as just another aspect of living?
Will tomorrow’s C-suite executives be as different from today’s as those now in chairs of authority differ from their counterparts of yesterday in their double-breasted suits with secretaries bringing them coffee as soon as they arrived at their privileged offices? Who knows? The message here is clear. “Either get with it or get out of the way.”
