Philanthropy in the age of artificial intelligence

Have you paid any attention to artificial intelligence (AI)? Do you think AI is not affecting your life and your work?

If you think AI isn’t an important part of your existence anymore, buddy, think again.

If you haven’t heard of Partnership on AI, you may want to check it out. AI is already affecting many aspects of our lives, including the way we live and communicate, our businesses, and, yes, even philanthropy.

We live with AI every day

In 2016, Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and others created the AI ​​Association. Other members include humanitarian and philanthropic giants like UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, and the ACLU. Why is this happening? Technology is developing so rapidly that it is fundamentally changing the way we live now and in the future.

You may not realize it, but you are getting involved or affected by powerful AI tools every day.

• When you drive and use a GPS app like Waze, when you learn about traffic congestion and the time to reach your destination, artificial intelligence processes all that data.

• Uber’s famous (or infamous) pricing model and its increase are done with AI.

• If you are flying in a commercial airplane, the pilot generally only handles the rudder for 7 minutes of flight. The rest of the time, guess who the captain is.

• When you use social media like Facebook and they give you suggestions of who to tag because your friends are in the image you are uploading, guess who knows the names of your friends to tag. Facebook (and AI) have facial recognition capabilities. So does your iPhone if you’re an Apple fan.

• Even with email, when your email is going to be spam, that filter is AI.

• Personal assistants like Siri and Alexa are AI.

There are many other examples. Meanwhile, there are world leaders like Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking who say that we should pay attention to artificial intelligence because it represents an existential threat to humanity.

Humans are the dominant species because our brains can think, reason, use logic, and create. It puts us at an advantage over all other creatures that inhabit this planet. However, we may have come across artificial intelligence. The concern is that as AI gets smarter and stronger than us, we could lose our ability to control it. And all you have to do is watch a movie to see what that might portend for humanity.

Association on AI

The AI ​​Association was created to dialogue and drive thinking (eg, Global Policy and Legislation) to ensure that we benefit from artificial intelligence but do not subordinate ourselves to it or, worse, destroy us. There are four key objectives for the organization.

1. Develop and share best practices

2. Provide an open and inclusive platform for discussion and participation

3. Advanced public understanding

4. Identify and encourage aspirational efforts in AI for socially beneficial purposes

AI and philanthropy

Philanthropy is already affected by artificial intelligence. In early 2017, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, Omidyar Network, and others created a $ 27 million fund to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits and does not harm humanity. nor destroy it. .

Yet on a day-to-day basis, nonprofit CEOs and their teams use artificial intelligence to raise awareness and generate money. Charities Aid Foundation published an article describing some charities that are already working on how to incorporate AI into their operations. Some of those examples include the following:

• Children’s Society has started using Microsoft AI-powered translation tools.

• The Protection Assistant for Wildlife Safety (PAWS) is using artificial intelligence to analyze the data they have accumulated over the years on poaching behavior.

• The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative bought Meta, which has used AI to research, navigate, and prioritize all existing scholarly articles.

If you haven’t paid too much attention to the ongoing discussion about artificial intelligence because you feel it doesn’t affect you or the work you do, think again. At the moment, AI is in our lives and in our work, but probably in ways that we neither realize nor realize. However, AI will quickly become a force to be reckoned with in a sense (hopefully) that will allow us to do amazing things in life and business, including the nonprofit sector. And organizations that pay attention and look to the future are likely to benefit the most.