The recent news of a violent road attack—an HR executive chased, her car vandalized, and a woman hospitalized for surgery—has deeply unsettled me. It’s a stark reminder of the raw, unpredictable aggression that can surface within human beings when composure shatters. This incident isn't just a traffic dispute; it's a symptom of a deeper societal brittleness, a failure of our collective "algorithms" of civility and empathy.
It makes me reflect on a blog I wrote years ago, "Revenge of AI" Revenge of AI. In it, I optimistically mused about the future of AI, hoping it would remain "devoid of human frailties of jealousy / anger / revenge." The irony is not lost on me now, seeing such primal human frailties explode onto our streets. We aspire to build AI systems that are safe and helpful, striving to strip away bias and unpredictability, yet we continue to grapple with these very same issues in our own behavior.
This brings to mind the discussions around AI safety, such as those covered by Melissa Heikkilä (melissa.heikkila@ft.com) in her piece about DeepMind's efforts to make chatbots safer How DeepMind thinks it can make chatbots safer. She highlighted the "brittleness" of sophisticated systems when taken to unfamiliar territory, and how crucial it is to have "humans in the loop." Sara Hooker, who leads Cohere for AI, pointed out the challenge of agreeing on what constitutes "inappropriate" conversation, and Geoffrey Irving from DeepMind emphasized how dialogue helps us communicate what we truly want from machines. What if we applied this same rigor to understanding and mitigating the "brittleness" in human interactions? What if we needed more "humans in the loop" to de-escalate rather than inflame situations in our daily lives?
My own experiences, documented in blogs like "Productivity - A Look: Backward and Forward" Productivity - A Look: Backward and Forward and "Working Smarter" Working Smarter, focused on building trust and motivation in challenging environments, like the Mumbai factory of Larsen & Toubro. We worked to break "communication barriers" and address the "motivation-barrier" by fostering "worker participation and involvement." People like G. Ramakrishna, who convened the initial Productivity Committee, understood the human element. [Walter Fallen](), Chairman of Eastman Kodak, articulated the idea of "Working Smarter" as "imparting a strong sense of teamwork and giving employees more say about how they do their jobs." These were conscious efforts to cultivate positive human interactions and shared responsibility.
The core idea I want to convey is this — I had brought up the thought of preventing human frailties in AI years ago, and now, seeing how human nature can still erupt in such violent ways, it's striking how relevant that earlier insight still is. Reflecting on it today, I feel a renewed urgency to revisit those ideas of fostering participation, communication, and a sense of shared responsibility, because they clearly hold value not just in the workplace, but in the larger societal context where we desperately need to cultivate empathy and control over our most primitive impulses.
Regards, Hemen Parekh
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