AI is everywhere and there is a growing rift between AI as a technology market and AI as a business or application market. AI is pervasive, everywhere inside our bodies, in our talking to us in our homes, bringing autonomy to our cars, watching us in city traffic lights, running factors and airports and monitoring our health, moods and predicting our behaviours and pushing us to shop, listen to music, exercise and live our lives.

I believe we have gone past the 'why do we need AI' to 'why we should participate in building AI.'

1. AI is built by technologists and needs you

Technologies of the past were built and launched by technologists and worked fine. With AI they are built by technologists but are not scaling successfully because they need data, and in it is the call for your business acumen of what works for your business.

2. AI propagates biases from our imperfect world to our future
AI is biased and creates a feedback loop of leaving behind minorities who are not present in the AI building teams. Did you know that some top AI Technology models cannot recognize men with beards correctly? And ofcourse it feeds the bias of a few to target black people with recidivism and women from technology company jobs.
So you need to be part of the AI building process to bring your lived truth to teach AI the world you want to build.

3. AI is creating our future and needs you to shape it

AI is trained by historic data. And in our history is good and bad of what we have learnt as humans. We need you to get involved in figuring out what from our collective pasts do we teach AI and what do we stop and change to make our future better for our children? It is all in the data that is used to train the AI. Also, AI is accelerating its learning to create original content -writing with new GPT-3, images with GAN (fake images) and non-existent synthetic voices. We all need to participate to shape this world to work for all of us to create the future we desire to create.

So when we think of 'why AI' let us think about our role in shaping AI at our work, in our lives and into our future.

Explainable AI is the solution to make AI transparent and get all stakeholders involved to make AI transparent for all. Feel free to join #100DaysofXAI from Yashaswani Visvanath and get her weekly digest on XAI here.

Sudha Jamthe is a Technology Futurist and AI instructor at Stanford Continuing Studies and Barcelona Technology School. Her vision is a limitless world.