The future of work and ethical concerns
I've been working in MICE industry including venue and trade show management, which are labor-intensive industry in terms of face-to-face service management. AI would replace firstly labor-intensive staffs who provide simple services like information center and call center, etc. Also there are some risks that would occur as machines would replace human. AI would analyze patterns of trade show visitors and exhibitors so that AI recommends appropriate booth or convention participants to meet. In that case machines could not provide exact information for humans if AI doesn't analyze right data for output. Human must engage in the process of machine learning so that we can control of mistakes by AI. Therefore, I think AI will firstly replace the labor-intensive human jobs, but also it will create new kind of jobs such as data analysis and filtering jobs to decide which data should be put into machine learning for best output and recommendation service. Also human staffs will need to upskill their work knowledge not only about experience marketing but also about AI technology for applying into face-to face marketing.
I can imagine the situation that machines could work together with human regarding analyzing tradeshow visitors’ purpose and matching with exhibitors before the show opens. It would enhance the sales lead for exhibitors and getting better business insights for visitors because visitors don’t need to wander around the exhibition hall, also exhibitors can make plan for meeting better as well. Even though AI could enhance the business performance, Human-in-the-loop approach should be engaged in machine learning process. First, humans should label data. This gives AI model high quality so that machines learn and make decision more precisely. Second, humans tune and test the result of machine learning process. People should test and validate the result by measuring its outputs, or feedback from the people who actually follow the result. As humans do the role of filtering data and tuning the process, machine would do better in analyzing and proposing recommendation based on each humans’ needs.
Firstly I can assume that robots or AI might provide harmful information like bar, adult casino to kids if family groups ask robots about leisure activities in some casino resorts. AI should monitor about human’s gender and age so that it could provide precise information based on each humans’ requirements. Second, AI would replace human labor who earns salary and keep families. Organizations could save cost by utilizing AI but it would affect badly the life of contract workers and economically disadvantaged family. I think this could make negative impact to society as jobs would decrease. Therefore, government and organization should make appropriate policy balancing the use of AI and humans.
Fortunately, it is just starting point to applying AI into MICE industry. So we should develop ethical standards to control and measure. Frameworks and policy can minimise the risks of AI and ensure the technology is used to create a safer, fairer world for everyone.
There's an opportunity to contribute to ethical AI, even if we don't come from a background in data science or machine learning. Show organizers, meeting planners and venue managers have an opportunity to partner with AI ethics initiatives to support safe innovation.