When Good Intentions Aren’t Good Enough

History is chock full of new technologies developed with good intentions. But if we’ve learned anything over the past few decades, it’s that doing research and designing products has layers of complexity. It isn’t enough to just build tech for others – we have to build it in close partnership and community with those who will use it. In this episode of Future Fluent, Betsy and Jeremy talk with Dr. Elvira Salazar, a life-long educator, passionate devotee of STEM education and NASA, and now the Director of Online Learning & Technology for Latinos for Education. They’ll talk about what the AI community gets right – and gets wrong – in the rush to build the next great thing. 

Learn more!

• To explore more of Dr. Salazar’s work, a great place to start is the Latinos for Education website. 

• She also contributed this piece, “Learnings from the Front Lines on Redefining Leadership for the Age of AI,” to EdSurge. 

• Dr. Salazar described the work of CLEAR, or the Center for Leadership Equity and Research. You can explore the groups work as well as its AI initiative at Clearvoz.com 

• This story, “AI Leaves Some Students Lost in Translation,” explores in more detail some of the promise and challenges of AI development for the Latino community. (You can also try out the Playlab app developed by the group, “Elevating your Speaking,” a tool that parents can use to support their students’ language development skills, here.) 

• Stanford University professor, Dr. Sanmi Koyejo, discusses his white paper about how AI is leaving non-English speakers behind here. The full report from Dr. Koyejo and his team is here: “Mind the (Language) Gap: Mapping the Challenges of LLM Development in Low-Resource Language Contexts.” 

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