My invited talk at Latinity 2020 (Past)

Many thanks Yeu Wen! I read that article with interest, and wholeheartedly agree with your main message: nurturing our humanity is essential. I'd like to suggest perusing what I consider the best book on the subject- one that I believe should be obligatory reading in all AI and technological careers (and beyond): "Nurturing our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape our Brains, Lives and Future", by Riane Eisler and Douglas F. Fry (Oxford, 2019).

I do have to issue a warning about the sometimes too simplistic reductions of humanity to machine-analogous concepts. The article's "feedback loops in which each user is influenced by the choice and conviction of the others allowing the puck to end up at the answer best reflecting the collective wisdom of the group" may not actually result in best reflecting the collective wisdom: other variables, as well as other aspects of infuentiability and swift reaction need to be considered, e.g. might power imbalances in a group mean that members of less self-assured/less dominant subgroups might tend to discard their own - and perhaps better- judgement in return for a sense of belonging, inclusion, acceptance that "agreeing" with others might procure them? Would a swift reply indicate the best option is swiftly evident to the person, or perhaps instead, indicate shallow judgement, i.e., the arrival at certainty after only a shallow consideration of possibilities, as opposed to more deliberate, conscious, deep considerations?
I agree with Anita Wolley that in AI it is easy to be harmful (one only has to look at the coded bias that Big Data algorithms, unchecked by any regulations that could channel their uses towards only socially useful applications, are imposing upon society). But we need more studies, with interdisciplinary and representative perspectives, to be conclusive about what are the main factors that influence collective intelligence.
We also have to be careful with partial quotes, e.g. Anita Woolley is quoted as stating that "the biggest factor affecting how collectively intelligent a group can be is the degree of coordination among its members", but if you read her research more closely, there are three main factors her research has identified. These are, in no particular order: 1) the social sensitivity of its members; 2) the number of women in the group (the higher number, the more intelligent the group- in later work this is extended into representation of diversities); 3) that each member of the team take more or less equitable turns in speaking [Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., andMalone, T. W.Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups.Science 330, 6004 (2010), 686–688]. Coordination alone would bring less collective intelligence than if all three factores are all attended to: it is obvious that coordinating the opinions of a totally hegemonic group (say, white male elite "geeks") will fail to even consider the necessary perspectives of those unrepresented.- hegemonic groups being typically unaware of those perspectives, thinking that their own is "the norm". This is how we end up, for instance, with cars where women are likely to have serious accidents 47% times more often than men, when male engineers neither consult nor consider women when designing and testing cars exclusively with male dummies, or how we end up with drugs that have only been tested on males being imposed upon women (with sometimes tragic results for beings of any sex, as with thalidomide).

I hope more discussions in this event will be focused on harnessing the collective intelligence of the community as enshrined in the “Nurture human nature” principle of practice.
How AI can help us harness our 'collective intelligence' - https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200513-how-ai-can-help-us-harness-our-collective-intelligence