All-Party Parliamentary Group on AI Evidence meeting
– AI & Me, 10/02/20
Ross Edwards
Immersive Technologies Director – IORMA
A varied panel covered a number of topics while looking for a best practice guide on how citizens participation could and should take up AI adoption. This could include anything from city or state governance, to how AI should be implemented in ones daily life.
One approach mentioned ‘Human in Command’ along with workplace participation is to help allay the fears of AI.
James Hadlow, Senior Policy and Strategy Lead – NHS England, spoke of issues regarding security and consent forms and the need for public engagement. He also mentioned potential issues of technology being used in scenarios that they were not initially intended such as Alexa being used for medical diagnosis and if services become dependent on such apps but then the wifi fails where is the responsibility.
Laura Hadlow, an AI engineer, spoke about the difficulty they had for their medical app to access data, such as from a fitbits, and being able to make use of time sensitive data before it becomes irrelevant .
Prof Chris Reed, Dundee University, spoke about the issues of inaccurate and exaggerated reporting of the subject and in his opinion AI is no closer to taking over the world then it was 64 years ago at the Dartmouth conference where the term AI was coined.
Dr Zeynep Engin from Urban Dynamics, UCL, talked about the power of search engines and how dependent they are on the algorithm and the quality of the data being fed into them.
Canadian author, Peter Scot spoke about educating and reaching people in different age groups and demographics and to recognise the different needs of those groups. It was also mentioned that different societies could have different fears to deal with depending on how AI is portrayed in different countries.