AI For Mars Will Rely On Lessons Learned From Customer Data

I learned everything I know about space travel from business. I have worked on consumer data since AOL and Yahoo, and spent more than 20 years at companies now part of Omnicom, most recently as global chief technology officer and then chief AI officer. My work has been on consumer data, the trail people leave when they shop, browse, and click, and on restricted data in healthcare and financial services, where the law decides who may see a record and why. I never worked on a spacecraft. But as I began to understand NASA’s plans for a crew on its way to Mars, and the AI that crew will rely on, I kept finding problems I had already lived through.

The core problem is time. NASA plans for delays of "up to 22 minutes one-way for Mars." Researchers at NASA Ames, KBR, and San José State, reviewing 20 years of delay studies, concluded that “certain roles and responsibilities will need to shift from the ground team to the onboard crew, depending on latency duration.” The crew, and the systems it carries, will have to decide alone.

Businesses that run on consumer data, and the hospitals, insurers, and banks that hold restricted data, have been deciding on late, doubtful data for years. Here are six lessons they taught me.

The Message They Ignore

Personalization that works for almost everyone can still hurt the one person it gets wrong. In December 2014, Facebook’s Year in Review greeted web designer Eric Meyer with "Eric, here’s what your year looked like!" above a photo of his daughter, who had died that year. Meyer called it "inadvertent algorithmic cruelty,” the result of code that works in the overwhelming majority of cases. The product manager behind the feature apologized to him directly.