Jesse Venegas believes we are on the cusp of a technological revolution that will change the way we do everything from work to play to education.
He is worried people of color will miss out on the boom stemming from the rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and is giving a TED-style talk from noon to 3 p.m. on June 7 at the Mexicantown CDC Galeria, 2835 Bagley in Southwest Detroit to address it.
“There will be huge leaps in technology,” said Venegas, president of the Ideal Group. “There is a whole wave of modernization coming.”
TED, Technology Entertainment and Design, is a nonprofit that posts short videos meant to get people talking about and looking deeper into various issues. The TED talks caught on and have become a staple for many looking to learn or do more about a particular idea.
Venegas wants people of color to not get lost in the shuffle because they are underrepresented in the high-tech sector and management in that sector.
The United States Employment Opportunity Commission’s Diversity in the High Tech Workforce and Sector that examined data from 2014 to 2022 found that 7.4 percent of the workforce were African American and Latinos comprised 9.9 percent. Blacks were 5.7 percent of the managers in the field while Latinos were 8.1 percent, according to the commission’s report.
Many small business owners are used to doing the work themselves, hiring consultants or relying on their employees to plan construction projects, landscaping designs and blueprints for housing developments. Venegas would like people not in the tech fields to understand they still need access to the knowledge in order to compete, even if it seems like it does not affect their business. AI can do some of that work in minutes, whereas a consultant may take a few weeks.
“AI will make things move faster,” Venegas said.
But people still will be needed to make sure real world applications are being considered and included, he said.
“We will always need people,” Venegas said. “It (AI) is not perfect. But it is here and it is not going away.”
The advancements are changing the way work is done in factories, at plants on construction sites as well as in the medical fields, the service industry and transportation.
‘It is not the jobs of the 1980s – a job on the line,” Venegas said. “There still will be the manual labor side of it but a tech side as well.”
The free talk is sponsored by the Minority Education Freedom Foundation, Latinos en Michigan and CreateValue, an innovation and entrepreneurship consulting company.
“AI has changed the game,” said Andres Ospino, founder of CreateValue. “We need to start playing that game. If we do not do it right now, we will be left behind.”
Ospino compares the invention of and usage of AI to when computers, Internet and the social media were invented and came to be commonly used.
“We want to be part of the next tech generation,” Ospino said, comparing AI to the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. “We need to be talking about tech and how we use it. What are the barriers? What are we facing?”
Venegas said he will discuss the downfalls of AI, as well. There are concerns about the technology taking on a life of its own, like in science fiction movies and unintended consequences. There also are more real world issues. Venegas’ company recently used AI when confidential data was accidentally posted publicly online because it was not filtered out.
“You have to be thoughtful how you use AI,” he said.
To register for the event, visit bit.ly/LatinoVoicesinTech.
Santiago Esparza is a Detroit-based freelance writer. He is a native of Southwest Detroit.
This article was made possible thanks to a generous grant to EL CENTRAL Hispanic News by Press Forward, the national movement to strengthen communities by reinvigorating local news. Learn more at www.pressforward.news.
