Why AI Needs Ethics First | Nekia Nichelle & Shekhar Natarajan | Live at CES 2026

What's one thing that the AI industry can benefit from slowing down?

Well, I, I think, like, uh, if you, if you think about, uh, artificial intelligence, um, and the profound impact it's gonna have on the society, uh, it's gonna be multi-generational.

It's as big as Industrial Revolution.

But with Industrial Revolution, we had, like, 70 years.

70 years, right? Like, you know, when, when, like, people looked in the eye of basically their employers and said, "Hey, like, we need to have weekend." Weekend was created because of Industrial Revolution and the negotiating capability of the employee with the employer.

Mm.

Right?

Mm-hmm.

We, we actually, like, passed rules on basically, like, not to have child labor.

Right.

So these are all things basically, like, that were generated because time was created.

And now with artificial intelligence, even before you know it, at 3:00 a.m. the call center is gone because all, all it takes is for you to update the code and everything is automated.

And, and that's a scary thought.

Like, you know, like, whenever you're going after efficiency, you pull out dignity somewhere.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

You make it inhuman.

You dehumanize things.

And so we need to slow down.

We need to basically understand the consequences of what we're doing.

So artificial intelligence is not about automating everything and optimizing everything.

It is about finding those things that we should not optimize.

Mm-hmm.

Where is the line of efficiency and where is the line of dignity, and when does it cross over? And having, like, sort of, like, presence of mind in all of these things.

That's really, you know, cre- key to this.