At Memorial Union’s Grand Hall, a room of 100 University of Wisconsin-Madison students gathered to hear 14 speakers from the worlds of tech, medicine and business share business tips and their views on the evolving application of artificial intelligence (AI) in their industries.
The event, held April 4, was hosted by TEDxUW-Madison, an independent, student-run organization licensed by the national non-profit TED. Speakers from major companies such as Zoom, Ralph Lauren and Oracle Health shared life advice and business tips ranging from managing a startup to environmentally friendly purchasing.
UW-Madison senior Hank Newell told The Daily Cardinal he was there to feel inspired before graduating. Some students were drawn to specific speakers, with others interested as they heard them talk throughout the night.
Multiple speakers explored the tension between AI and human connection. While there was daylight between speakers, most agreed that while AI was a promising tool, there were dangers and unobtainable human aspects inherent to the technology that could never be fixed.
“We are in an era of unprecedented transformation, where artificial intelligence is not only redefining industries, but it's shaping the way we feel and experience the world around us,” said Nasim Afsar, Oracle Health’s former chief health officer.
For Afsar and many of the other speakers, generative AI was an “inevitable” technology that offered the ability to redefine industries from the ground up, but could become harmful to those very same businesses.
Illuminate CEO Cole Erdmann centered much of his speech on the ”joyful and fearful” aspects of AI he encounters every day leading the medical tech start-up. His speech highlighted the benefits generative AI can bring to the workforce but also warned of the potential downsides of what he called an “overdose” of AI in business. The “overdose” of AI systems possibly leading to the replacement or overt disruption of programs built on face-to-face interaction, Erdmann said.
“Are we actually going to understand a problem? Are we actually going to have a problem that matters? That's the fearful part [of using AI],” Erdmann said, alluding to the fake sources and responses many generative AI programs can output.
Drawing from his own experience, Erdmann described how his attempt to develop a program for early sepsis detection — a leading cause of death in hospitals — failed due to poor parameter implementation. The system was “rejected, almost like an antibody,” by medical staff, Erdmann said.
“That algorithm tries to define a sick patient, who is inside a hospital filled with sick people,” Erdmann said. “So it alerted [doctors] to every single wing of the hospital — the entire ICU, the ER. Every patient was getting an alert.”
Afsar also saw the danger of AI models within the medical sphere, noting how the “indifference” of AI models can — and has — led to well-intentioned projects being misled by a misunderstanding of how AI interacts with their prompts. Because AI has been trained on predominately white male-based historical studies, it can have an inherent bias built into its methods of identification that leads to less accurate diagnoses for Black and female patients, she said.
Not all speakers were as cautious about AI, and many enthusiastically embraced its potential. Girish Rishi, the CEO of Cognite, a consulting firm which utilizes AI and dataset aggregation to inform their business partners, likened generative AI to the “Wisconsin Idea” — a long-standing UW-Madison principle encouraging the use of knowledge to benefit society.
Similar to how the Wisconsin Idea encourages students and faculty to apply their education for the greater good, Rishi said he hopes AI's “incredible” impact will enrich communities and spark a global “A.I. industrial revolution.”
Andrew Rebhun, a UW-Madison alum and chief experience officer at the restaurant chain Cava, echoed Erdmann’s outlook on AI. He said it would “enhance the human experience, not replace it,” attributing its current ubiquity to its status as a “hot buzzword.”
Erdmann also expressed optimism about the future of AI. He told the Cardinal that AI was “not something we should be fearful of.” He said most companies would still have to do “the same work as before,” and AI was simply a new tool to enhance their existing work.
Rebhun agreed with Erdmann, arguing that AI would only ever augment their industries as a tool for exploration, not a replacement for human skill.
“A lot of the themes you’ve heard today are about people, talent and development,” Rebhun said. “And through human connection you can accomplish all of those.”
