The impact of AI on business and society

Artificial intelligence, or AI, has long been the object of excitement and fear. In July, the Financial Times Future Forum think-tank convened a panel of experts to discuss the realities of AI -- what it can and cannot do, and what it may mean for the future. Entitled "The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Business and Society", the event, hosted by John Thornhill, the innovation editor of the FT, featured Kriti Sharma, founder of AI for Good UK, Michael Wooldridge, professor of computer sciences at Oxford university, and Vivienne Ming, co-founder of Socos Labs. For the purposes of the discussion, AI was defined as "any machine that does things a brain can do". Intelligent machines under that definition still have many limitations: we are a long way from the sophisticated cyborgs depicted in the Terminator films. Such machines are not yet self-aware and they cannot understand context, especially in language. Operationally, too, they are limited by the historical data from which they learn, and restricted to functioning within set parameters. Rose Luckin, professor at University College London Knowledge Lab and author of Machine Learning and Human Intelligence, points out that AlphaGo, the computer that beat a professional (human) player of Go, the board game, cannot diagnose cancer or drive a car.