Richard Landers: Why Does the Future of AI Need Liberal Arts?

How can workplace psychology be used to inform artificial intelligence (AI) practices? How does industrial organizational psychology training aid in the ethical usage of AI? How can we apply a liberal arts education to the world of business?

Though these questions seem unrelated, CLA professor and alum Richard Landers (PhD ‘09, psychology) utilizes his liberal arts research experience to answer these questions through both psychological and entrepreneurial application.

His work as both a business owner and a researcher serves to answer one of the biggest questions currently impacting the workforce: how can we ethically make effective use of artificial intelligence in hiring practices?

Small Business, Big Application

Landers is the John P. Campbell Distinguished Professor of Industrial-Organizational (I-O) Psychology at the University of Minnesota. He runs the TNTLAB (Testing New Technologies in Learning, Assessment, and Behavior), studying the applications of technology in a variety of workplace-related settings.

He also directly works in industry through his small business, Landers Workforce Science LLC (LWS).“The company is focused on applying broad I-O psychology expertise to understand how technology is being used in the context of employee selection, training, and development,” says Landers.

The company initially started with a more general definition of ‘technology’, including gamification and virtual reality. With the recent rise of artificial intelligence in workforce applications, Landers has recently moved more exclusively into the AI space.

LWS now helps organizations evaluate and create artificial intelligence-based hiring and decision-making systems, using methods that ensure organizational improvement, standardization, and fairness.

“I provide advice about how to develop something that will one: help [companies] hire better people, and two: do so in a way that’s not discriminatory and likely to stand up to legal scrutiny,” he says.

AI is Inherently Interdisciplinary

How does Landers define and ensure ethical AI usage?

He says the first piece of the puzzle is defining what makes something ethical. Like many psychologists, he first looks to the American Psychological Association’s five core ethical principles: beneficence, fidelity, integrity, justice, and respect for people’s rights and dignity. Though LWS informs companies about large-scale AI operations, Landers still likes to think about the end product: “It’s ultimately about people taking individual actions,” he says. “For me, that still informs the way that we should approach AI.”

The other piece of the ethical puzzle typically involves hard computer science skills, like systems design and management. The benefit to this is that Landers can approach new systems with a wide variety of perspectives and expertise. “AI is inherently interdisciplinary. It is very hard to be sure it is doing good things if you’re limited to a single discipline.”

The final piece, he argues, is staying on top of the progression of AI. “People who are more willing to jump into the AI space and experiment with it are getting more experience and awareness.” This makes it easier to track its development, limitations, and progress, he says.

And the key to this interdisciplinary approach? A liberal arts education.

Liberal Arts to Innovation

Landers’ background is in the liberal arts. After receiving a bachelor’s Psychology degree from the University of Tennessee, he received his PhD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at the University of Minnesota. The decisions that characterize the practices of LWS, from the work itself to running the business, are informed by the variety of experiences available to liberal arts students.

“It’s exposure to lots of different ways of thinking about problems that you don’t get in a more focused, more vocationally-oriented education,” Landers says.

Many of the college’s programs also specifically build research experience into their curricula, including the psychology program, which is another big bonus according to Landers. “Having any sort of research training is about learning how to evaluate claims and questionable ideas and sales, and distinguishing between what’s an argument versus what’s an assertion.” This comes in handy in a wide variety of professional careers, including entrepreneurship.

“It teaches you to be a critical consumer of information, in a way that’s not just pure skepticism, but rather that you can appreciate the complexity of every decision that you’re facing.”

The Entrepreneurial Lens

But how does a liberal arts background specifically inform running a business? To that, Landers says, “a lot of being successful in running a business is being able to evaluate a huge amount of different types and different varieties of information.”

Beyond this, Landers also cites the varied internship possibilities available as a psychology major as essential to running his own company. “That experience gave me a lot of very direct insight into what kind of challenges everyday businesses were running into, which helped inform the way I would run my business later.”

Internships should be a core part of the liberal arts experience, and Landers encourages students to make use of those opportunities – though it requires a bit of initiative. “It’s an investment in not only specific job opportunities later, but in the way you approach problems, the way you think about the world,” he says.

Exploring the Future

The future of AI in the workplace is still highly uncertain. Landers states that he expects a learning curve, one where things get worse before they get better.

“It’s really hard to see society-level change while you’re in the middle of it,” he says. “It’s those who are learning, experimenting, and exploring who are consistently advantaged.” With a background in the liberal arts, it’s much easier than you’d think to get involved.

This story was written by Rory Schaefer, an undergraduate student in CLA.