UK public sector failing to be open about its use of AI, review finds – TechCrunch

A report into the use of artificial intelligence by the U.K.'s public sector has warned that the government is failing to be open about automated decision-making technologies which have the potential to significantly impact citizens' lives. Ministers have been especially bullish on injecting new technologies into the delivery of taxpayer-funded healthcare -- with health minister Matt Hancock setting out a tech-fueled vision of "preventative, predictive and personalised care" in 2018, calling for a root and branch digital transformation of the National Health Service (NHS) to support piping patient data to a new generation of "healthtech" apps and services. He has also personally championed a chatbot startup, Babylon Health, that's using AI for healthcare triage -- and which is now selling a service in to the NHS. Policing is another area where AI is being accelerated into U.K. public service delivery, with a number of police forces trialing facial recognition technology -- and London's Met Police switching over to a live deployment of the AI technology just last month. However the rush by cash-strapped public services to tap AI "efficiencies" risks glossing over a range of ethical concerns about the design and implementation of such automated systems, from fears about embedding bias and discrimination into service delivery and scaling harmful outcomes to questions of consent around access to the data sets being used to build AI models and human agency over automated outcomes, to name a few of the associated concerns -- all of which require transparency into AIs if there's to be accountability over automated outcomes.