Day 2 of the ICT Spring 2019 AI/Digital Summit was opened by Master of Ceremonies Sabinije von Gaffke, moderator, communications expert, content creator and TV host. The session took place on May 22nd, at the ECCL and was entitled "The Age of AI Innovation".

In her welcoming speech she shared that “As an impact diplomat and social entrepreneur this is at the core of my professional interest”. She has been looking at how technology for good can help solve some of the ethical challenges related to AI and feels that trust not only anchors our culture but has also become a competitive advantage.

 

Ethical AI and Fairness Tool

Öztürk Taspinar (Senior Manager, Digital Lead BeLux, Accenture Digital) opened with an anecdote. He said that how typically on a Sunday he plays board games with his young kids. One Sunday they lost the dice, and he started to show his kids how he could make a dice from a piece of card. His six-year-old daughter asked “Why are you doing that Daddy, just ask Alexa to throw the dice”!

He then went on to draw an analogy with the adult world in pointing out that this is the way that AI aware organisations and individuals have been thinking for the last few years.

Mr. Taspinar wished to assume that the audience is largely aware of what the challenges of AI are today, and proposed instead to talk about the next step … shifting day to day activities to the “human plus machine environment”.

Basically AI is driven by data and algorithms, and is already deeply integrated in our lives. In 2020 (that’s next year!), 85% of our interactions will be managed by AI. This is an exciting and uncertain future, and Mr. Taspinar asked the audience to think about the unintended consequences that AI could bring. For example, Amazon discovered that owing to the skew of historical data, their AI algorithms prefer male employees. In the same way AI credit risk prediction also carries inherent bias, but it is not necessarily the algorithms that are to blame, it is the data.

Either way Mr. Taspinar sees an anthropomorphism of AI, where there is a shifting of the consequences of decisions from human to machine

He finished by urging the audience to consider the digital traces that they leave every day, and how this could affect their own data and their own algorithms.

 

The Six Superpowers of AI

Gary Bolles, Chair for the Future of Work at the Singularity University, first asked how will AI impact on the future of work and reflected that we are on the cusp of a great shift in the way that people work. The Digital Work Economy. He believes that being on the cusp of a big shift places extra responsibilities on us.

Mr Bolles continued in saying that the next generation will be expected to resolve some of our biggest challenges … cure cancer, live longer, mine asteroids, but we need to understand how do we create one of the most abundant economies ever in an environment where AI takes over more and more of those tasks that we traditionally call work?

He spoke of the three alternative scenarios of: Dystopian analysis – lots of tech, lots of unemployment – and AI ushers in a huge opportunity where there won’t be enough workers to support all of the new tasks that will be created. He then went on to say that in reality, there will most probably be some kind of a hybrid situation where many traditional skills will no longer be required, but that there will be an abundance of new jobs which in many cases will suffer from a lack of sufficiently skilled workers to fill them.

The question then came back to the title of the presentation, as Mr. Bolles asked “How can we help humans to have superpowers to help solve the problems of tomorrow?” He defines six superpowers: Discover – as a child, nobody gave you the user manual of you … you discovered yourself by trial and error, and hopefully sometimes by trial and success. AI tech can be that user manual and help you to discover your own unique capabilities / Enhance – we increasingly use AI tech to enhance our skills, for example, if we need help on a topic when creating an Excel sheet, we no longer need to go to a manual, targeted help is just an F1 click away / Develop – through AI enhanced technology such as augmented reality glasses, a complete beginner can build new capabilities on the spot for example in fixing a problem in a car engine / Understand – use technology to help us in real time to deconstruct problems in order to be able to solve them more easily / Collaborate – use AI solutions to meld your unique skills with others – globally and instantaneously / Extend – we can extend our capabilities with embedded chips etc.

Mr. Bolles closed in remarking that each of us has a unique set of superpowers, we need to think of how to leverage them to help others to develop their own superpowers

 

How to build an open AI Nation

David Hogan (Enterprise Senior Editor for EMEA, NVIDIA) started with the question “What are we doing as nations in our adoption of AI?”. In almost every market sector the use of AI is part of core business .. radiology … AI evaluation of scans is hugely valuable against a backdrop of a reduction in skilled radiologists .. we can go on … industrial inspection, safety on oil rigs are driven by AI, Smart cities, autonomous cars, biopharmaceuticals, retail and financial are all increasingly reliant on AI.

So the question is, whose technology will we be using? Will our nation be a leader or a follower? In Europe it will not be based on investment, as the Eu invests less than 10% of what China does in AI research. So talent needs to be retained, and to do that, we need to become AI nations.

This can be done through Innovation Platforms (significant computer power is required to allow companies to upscale from proof of concept to production, and this platform needs to be available at an affordable price), Research collaboration (governments cannot make their countries into AI nations on their own, they need to work with researchers and universities and the public sector) and Industry solutions (need to be encouraged and supported by governments).