Ep. 23: Lorenzo Patelli - AI and Its Ethical Considerations

Contact Lorenzo Patelli:LinkedIn -
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenzo-patelli-2abb518/
University of Denver bio -
https://daniels.du.edu/directory/lorenzo-patelli/


Daniels College of Business: https://daniels.du.edu/
Institute for Enterprise Ethics: https://daniels.du.edu/iee/



FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam: (00:00)


Hey everybody. Thank you for listening to another episode of
Count Me In. I'm Adam Larson sitting alongside Mitch Roshong and
our expert guests for this episode is Lorenzo Patelli. Dr.
Patelli, is an associate professor in the school of accountancy
and interim director of the Institute for Enterprise Ethics in
the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver. He
joined us on count me in to talk about the fascinating
intersection of artificial intelligence and ethics. Mitch, can
you tell us a little more about Dr. Patelli And his expertise in
AI and ethics? 


 


Mitch: (00:37)


Sure, Adam. Lorenzo Patelli also serves on the editorial board of
advances in management accounting and has received a number of
awards and honors for his teaching excellence in research. He was
recently a part of the elevate the ethics of artificial
intelligence event at the University of Denver and regularly
writes on the topic. Dr Patelli gives listeners a great overview
of AI and tells us all why management accountants have the skills
necessary to effectively manage the ethical implications of
artificial intelligence. Let's go to the discussion. 


 


Mitch: (01:08)


Artificial intelligence is certainly becoming more pervasive in
accounting and finance today. Can you please give us an overview
of what exactly artificial intelligence is and what it can do for
us? 


 


Lorenzo: (01:26)


Sure. Artificial intelligence is a field of computer science,
particularly this field is concerned with empowering machines to
think, behave and act like a han beings. In other words to make
sure that machines have intelligence. Yeah. So several different
technologies are developed to replicate the han senses and the
ability to draw a conclusion or make judgments based on on the
census. So for example, humans are able to talk and artificial
intelligence develop develop speech recognition tools. Humans are
able to move in artificial intelligence, develops motion planning
tools through robotics, for example. Humans are able to see, and
artificial intelligence develops computer regions. Humans are
able to learn from experience. So artificial intelligence
develops machine learning. So how does artificial intelligence
and how does as computer science develop this technologies? They
use different techniques, such as reinforcement learning. So
machines learns from executing tasks and make mistakes and so for
example, the LinkedIn notifications that we get from like a
website like LinkedIn, a social network lately are based on
reinforcement learning. So if we pay attention to this
notifications or not it's something captured by the machine and
it triggers a learning process. Another technique is deep
learning and deep learning has to do with artificial neural
networks that are meant to replicate the human brain. So there is
one input and one output with multiple hidden layers in between
in some advance search engines, are based on this technique. Then
we have machine learning and the ability to learn from data
without being programmed. So there is a training process where we
give data to the machine and the machine is trained and that
machine is capable of predict. So Google, Gmail or the automated
responses that we, use, you know, or texting for example on our
smart phones those are based on versions of machine learning. As
I said, then we have computer visions and computer vision tools
enable autonomous vehicles for example, to capture and understand
the surrounding or facial recognition on our game and our phones
and finally we have a natural language processes and with this
machine so capable to understand and react to human language. So
Alexa or Siri are technologies that we use base on NLP. So this,
these all these techniques basically in this this methods are
used by artificial intelligence to empower machine to examine a
phenomenon and initiate a response based on the analysis of if
not. 


 


Mitch: (05:09)


And with all of these capabilities, can you explain how AI has
already started playing a role in accounting and finance? 


 


Lorenzo: (05:15)


Yes. well, specifically management accounting is the practice of
judging organizational performance judging, meaning measuring,
reporting and interpreting factors that indicate whether an
organization is creating good destroying value. So at least in
theory, artificial intelligence has and will have their
remarkable impact on our profession. because exactly, we deal
with analyzing a phenomenon and producing your response, judging
it, but also practically, we know that in management accounting
is practice relying on machines, databases and these machines
nowadays deal with the large quantity of data in complex
environments in which processes and products themselves will more
and more run on artificial intelligence. So my view is that
artificial intelligence will have a huge impact on accounting and
finance. we know that companies that are already using some
artificial intelligence techniques like bots and machine learning
to enter data we know that bots are able to enter and categorize
data you fully automated way. We know that something like
reinforced learning is assisting companies in internal audit
tasks to detect fraud and compliance issues. We know that
companies are using language processing techniques to interpret
contracts and we can even speculate further and imagine a
performance measurement system completed a design based on
metrics defined by machine learning techniques. We can again
imagine initial iteration of budgets prepare through deep
learning and we can envision performance reports and feedback
processes, obtain through, language processing techniques. So the
impact is going to be a significant and it's going to be a
widespread in term of the type of companies who, which are going
to be affected and the areas within the companies that are going
to be affected. 


 


Mitch: (07:45)


Now I know another major component of accounting is ethics. So
I'm just curious, in your opinion, how do we separate the
opportunities from the threats of artificial intelligence when it
comes to the ethical application and potentially the negative
effects of artificial intelligence and machine learning? 


 


Lorenzo: (08:05)


Yeah, that's, that's a very, very important question and a
strategic finance ad published few interesting pieces on this
topic. As far as I see it it's important in first of all to have
a framework to look at this issue. And I grew up the unintended
consequences of AI in five major buckets. The first one is the
impact on work we do know that professions are going to be
disrupted and jobs would be lost and economies are actually
debating whether artificial intelligence, different from
technologists in the past are going to create jobs or destroy
jobs primarily. So it's an interesting issue from an economic
standpoint and it definitely poses some ethical considerations.
The second bucket is inequality. I'm not the of...