Human-centered AI: ensuring human control while increasing automation

A new synthesis is emerging that integrates Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies with Human-Computer Interaction to produce Human-Centered AI (HCAI). Advocates of this new synthesis seek to amplify, augment, and enhance human abilities, so as to empower people, build their self-efficacy, support creativity, recognize responsibility, and promote social connections. Researchers, developers, business leaders, policy makers and others are expanding the technology-centered scope of AI to include HCAI ways of thinking. This expansion from an algorithm-focused view to embrace a human-centered perspective, can shape the future of technology so as to better serve human needs. Educators, designers, software engineers, product managers, evaluators, and government agency staffers can build on AI-driven technologies to design products and services that make life better for the users. These human-centered products and services will enable people to better care for each other, build sustainable communities, and restore the environment. The passionate advocates of HCAI are devoted to furthering human values, rights, justice, and dignity, by building reliable, safe, and trustworthy systems. Early hypertext systems required user assigned links for text files, giving full control to users, while providing readers with an understandable and predictable design. However, innovators quickly realized that there were many strategies to improve hypertext designs by giving users spatial presentations of the related documents, recommendations for links, ways to collaborate, and interactive animated graphical presentations. Other features supported history-keeping, note-taking, and audio for all users, but especially for users with visual disabilities. Over time improved hypertext systems incorporated machine learning and other artificial intelligence techniques that provided automation of features, but sometimes produced unexpected and incomprehensible results. Current strategies are to give users more control by providing previews of potential traversals, reminders, alerts, and suggestions that guide human reflection about their goals and methods. Atzenbeck et al. suggest that hypertext is a method of inquiry, opening the door to creativity support tools that accelerate exploration and discovery, amplified by the Al-infused supertools of Human-Centered AI [1]. A medical hypertext scenario could enable a physician to provide a patient history, lab tests, and current symptoms as a starting point. The hypertext system could respond with a set of possible diagnoses, which could be selected by the physician, leading to a refined analysis, links to recent clinical trial results, suggestions of consulting specialists, and recommendations for leading treatment centers. The physician could share the analysis with teammates or specialists to get feedback. The physician's exploration records could be saved to the patient's history, so that the treatment plan could be formulated based on reliable resources and then refined by discussions with patients, who would be given links to patient-centered descriptions of the diagnosis and treatment plan. The physician is responsible for what happens, but this scenario provides a strong history for retrospective analyzes of the choices that were made and the outcomes. If human-centered AI design scenarios like this one are oriented to amplifying, augmenting, empowering and enhancing human performance, then the chance of successful outcomes will increase. The passionate advocates of HCAI are devoted to furthering human values, rights, justice, and dignity, by building reliable, safe, and trustworthy systems. The talk will include examples, references to further work, and discussion time for questions. These ideas are drawn from Ben Shneiderman's new book Human-Centered AI [6]. Further information at: https://hcil.umd.edu/human-centered-ai