Banishing Bias: AI Utopia Or Social Imperative?

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to permeate all aspects of our lives, questions of ethics and fairness are being vehemently debated. In a recent survey of IT professionals -- presented by Roger Taylor, chair of Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, at the Mobile World Congress 2019 -- 85% stated that their biggest concern was ethics. From gender-biased recruitment tools to racist computers, the implications of AI bias have begun to make themselves seen, heard and felt in a big way. As a leader in enterprise-level data for AI and having worked with speech technology for nearly two decades, I believe we have a responsibility to identify and eliminate bias in AI. But why is it such a huge challenge and how realistic are our hopes of banishing it altogether?