02/16/2022

Staying Human-centered in an Automated World

Smart tech has has suddenly become available to everyday people

“Smart tech” is an umbrella term we created to describe advanced digital technologies that make decisions for people, instead of people. It includes Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its subsets and cousins such as machine learning, natural language processes, smart forms, and chatbots, robots and drones.

Right now, smart tech is best at doing rote tasks like filling out intake forms, and answering the same questions over and again (“is my contribution tax-deductible?”). However, the technology is quickly embedding itself into the heart of nonprofit work in a wide variety of functions. As a result, we anticipate that staff will be free to focus on other activities. We call this benefit the “dividend of time,” which can be used to, say, reduce staff burnout, get to know clients in deeper ways and focus on problem-solving like addressing the root causes of homelessness in addition to serving homeless people. 

Smart tech has recently reached an inflection point common to technologies that reach everyday use: An enormous increase in computing power meets a dramatic decrease in the cost of the technology. As a result, technology that was previously available only to elite institutions like NASA or embedded in widely complicated systems has suddenly become available to everyday people and organizations for fundraising, accounting, human resources, service delivery and more.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.