Discussion at Moving from a Physical to a Digital Society, session 3 of the Business BSF, revolved around the principles needed in development of artificial intelligence as listed by Ms Nanna-Louise Wildfang Linde, Assistant General Counsel at Microsoft/CELA Central Eastern Europe from Denmark.
According to her, Microsoft has put forward six principles for AI solutions: they should be fair, reliable and safe, trustworthy, inclusive, responsible, and transparent.
Ms Wildfang Linde noted that there were many challenges as well as opportunities in using AI, but to “really use all the opportunities” people will have to trust it.
In addition to trusting AI, another challenge that remains unanswered at this point is how to “skill up our population and workforce for leveraging AI”. We must start getting together to address these challenges, she pointed out.
This was also taken up by Mr Boris Koprivnikar, Minister of Public Administration of the Republic of Slovenia, who believes that cooperation, internationality and interoperability of technologies are key in creating solutions that improve the quality of life.
Meanwhile, Mr Frank Barz, Head of Industrial Internet of Things at T-Systems International GmbH, noted that trust can also be built through appropriate communication of a solution.
For instance, “if I talk to a nurse in a hospital about a huge digitalisation project, she might fear losing her job. But if I tell her that we’re developing a supporting software … that will allow her to spend her time more effectively, she will support it”.
Moreover, Mr Samir Sharma, CEO of datazuum from United Kingdom, believes that “we’ve got to take some responsibility for ourselves and what we do with data, also for how we’re going to be shaping the ethical points and things like bias in algorithms.”
Taking up the issue of data, Mr William Entriken, Advisor to 0xcert and Independent Blockchain Developer from the United States, noted that “everything is public, intentionally or not”.
An advocate of blockchain technology, which is “public permanently”, he believes that it is better to start with “something that you know is going to be public”.
“By using blockchain you get more data that is public and transparent, and you authenticate it … I think government is going to be the leader in this, because it has transparency as a mandate,” he added.
As regards bridging the divide, the motto of this year’s BSF, the panellists agreed that, among other things, the internet should be a constitutional right to allow all people to enjoy the benefits of digitalisation.
According to Mr Sharma, “we must start thinking about people who do not have the infrastructure … We must start thinking about global community to not enlarge the divide, which is the way we’re going now”.
