Question: In this digital age, what do you believe is the role of human intellect in QA?
Vivek: Understanding the business context, acting as the voice of the customer are things that are not reproducible as yet and ultimately may never be because AI, ML will depend on the quality of the data that you get and probably. What we get is a biased data, that is not a representative sample of the world, but a sample of a certain subset of people and if you try to extrapolate that to everybody you end up pushing that bias into the system and into the results of the AI as well. So it’s that human understanding, the ability to say whether this is the right thing. It’s the ethics of the situation. It’s the humanness, it’s the connection, It’s the empathy, it’s the emotional connect with the end user which is the problem that we as intellectuals need to solve and that’s what we need to propagate and that’s what we need to be the spokespeople for as part of the QA function.
Ashok- Is it not the fear that AI is going to take over my job story, right?
Vivek: It is the fear that AI is going to take over my job story, but the fear should not be there because you can outsmart AI by changing the data. Recently the whole internet is full of that thing that made a Tesla car change its lane by physically changing the markers on the road overriding its automatic sensors and telling it to shift lanes. And then you keep hearing about this where it’s not able to understand that, it is the side of a truck and not the blue sky. Those things have happened, not to pick on Tesla, but basically just showing that it is bias-in-bias-out. It depends on how much data you give it. What’s the quality of data? So if I can validate the AI then AI can’t take my job because I am the one who did it.
