A deeper understanding of Artificial Intelligence is key to building a better future for our world

Most of us are aware that Artificial Intelligence (AI) exists on some level, but do we realise the impact that AI is already having on our lives today?

More importantly, do we understand the impact that it’s going to have on our future?

These are just some of the questions that were put to our panel of experts at our most recent event in Melbourne this week, hosted by Stone & Chalk CEO, Michael Bromley. You can watch the full discussion here.

As the home for emerging tech innovation, Stone & Chalk held this event as an opportunity to take a deeper dive into how AI is transforming the world around us, as well as determine how a better understanding of the applications of AI and the ethics surrounding its use can help ensure that AI has a more positive impact on our future.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have been part of our lives for several years now, whether we realise it or not, and it has a huge impact on the way we live and work as a society.

However, while some applications, such as Google Maps and LinkedIn, have simply been built to make our everyday lives easier, others are quite literally changing the future of humanity altogether.

Tracy Moore, General Manager for Data Strategy, Evangelism and Governance at Xero, provided us with two unique and polar opposite examples of life-changing AI applications.

"The application that makes me sad is all the effort of the people and the companies and the dollars and the investment that goes into trying to change behaviour online. So, think about advertising, think about social media, think about trying to change elections. Those applications of AI make me sad because they’re really driven by who has the most money, who has the agenda, and we as citizens don’t often win," says Tracy.

"On the flip side, the example of an AI application that does give me hope for the future is AlphaFold. AlphaFold is an AI application that figured out how the protein structures are folded based on their DNA sequence. This is a problem that scientists have been working on for more than 50 years, and what happened after this breakthrough is whole new streams of research into everything from COVID to Alzheimer’s and everything in between. So, when AI is used for the power of good, it can be pretty impressive."

Anthony Murfett, Head of the Division of Technology and National Security at the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources, agrees with this sentiment, pointing out that we are now putting AI to amazing use, such as protecting our food supply by detecting disease in Honeybee hives, and predicting the spread of bushfires using satellite and drone data to better protect vulnerable communities.

Despite its prominent use, however, AI is still an emerging technology, and we still have so much to learn about what it is and what it isn’t.

For those outside the field of AI, many believe that it is simply a means to make decisions beyond what human beings are capable of.

Jeff Feldman, Founder & Chief Technology Officer at Arden Street Labs, doesn’t agree entirely.

He tells us, "We’re deep in the healthcare space. We’re one of Australia’s largest virtual healthcare providers, and we embed AI into everything that we do, but it is not replacing clinical decisions. We’ve implemented a number of AI capabilities across our suite of software that helps the doctors and clinical teams prioritise, or better understand the situation of a patient so that they can make a clinical decision."

Tracy adds that at Xero, they’ve made a deliberate decision to develop AI suggestions, rather than outright Automation, as the regulations surrounding Accounting are so tight that there still needs to be a layer of human judgement in their software.

Another popular assumption is that AI is going to take all our jobs. This is where Anthony suggests that we need to manage the hype around AI and instead educate people on the opportunities.

"Even this morning in the media, we’re hearing stories about the threat of AI to jobs, so I think there’s a lot of work that we have to do to continue to explain the opportunity that’s there. We need to determine how we help people understand the technologies, and for those that might be in jobs that may rely on AI in the future, how do we help them understand the technology and reskill? I think that all becomes really important."

What about the ethical applications of AI? How can we overcome this enormous challenge?

Fi Milne, ML, AI & Data Science Expert, likened this challenge to trying to build the plane as we fly, suggesting that the issues we have surrounding ethics and AI are because we simply don’t know what we don’t know. That’s why AI or Machine Learning is always a few steps, at minimum, ahead of regulation.

"To be honest, though, regulation might not even be required. We can probably utilise a lot of our standard legislation, such as anti-discrimination law, and apply that to the systems that we’re building."

This, coupled with concepts such as the Scale of Bias – meaning that when things go wrong, they go wrong at scale – can also work in our favour, as this means that developers really need to think about the systems that they’re building, or else risk their own reputation, and possibly even litigation.

Anthony adds that "A couple of years ago, we did release Australia’s AI ethics principles, which were a real aim at setting the goalposts for what we thought would be the worst possible use of AI, but as we see greater adoption of these technologies, ethics is an area where we really are thinking through 'what does it mean and how do we apply it?'"

When asked if there was a way to embed core societal and human values into our AI and ML systems, Jeff points out that the definition of societal standards changes so quickly that it’s difficult to apply today’s standards to emerging AI technology.

This is most evident when we consider that, 20 years ago, many of us would not have been okay with sharing our entire lives on the internet, yet now we have Facebook and we all do it without even thinking.

Anthony believes that when we consider societal values, we first need to understand what the value sets and the diversity of views are.

"The more that we can work with communities, the more that we can work with those that are programming to ensure that we get diversity across the whole spectrum. They’re the kind of things that we really have to keep front of mind as we’re working with all these types of technologies to ensure we get that balance… If we do get it right, Australia can be known as the producer of responsible and trusted AI, and I think that’s a big benchmark that we can put a flag in."

It's clear that Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have truly revolutionised the way that we live and work – but this is only the beginning.

Here at Stone & Chalk, we are passionate about helping new and existing businesses across industries of all shapes and sizes to continue to break new ground and deliver exciting innovations to the world around us using the power of AI.