Karmel Allison often hears misconceptions about AI, from what it is to what it can do. With a career spanning bioinformatics, linguistics, health care advocacy and over a decade focused on artificial intelligence, she sees these misunderstandings as opportunities for conversations on what it means to be human, whether it’s through biology, language or technology.
“I’ve always had this drive to understand these huge, amorphous things that we deal with as humans,” says Allison, who studies AI trends as a technical advisor for Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott. “There are no easy answers in AI, which is part of what makes it fun. It’s an open-ended exploration of what we want the future to look like.”
Here’s Allison discussing four common misconceptions: