The perils of artificial responsibility: Developing and applying AI

In her recently published 2018 trends report, Mary Meeker discussed how the combination of accelerated data gathering due to computer adoption and the declining cost of cloud computing, have enabled Artificial Intelligence (AI) to emerge as a service platform. There are many definitions of AI, from machines that work and think like humans, through to "any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximise its change of successfully achieving its goal". Whilst the specifics of the definition are still discussed, what is now unequivocal is the power AI has to shape our lives, with intelligent assistants such as Siri and Alexa understanding our spoken commands, predictive maintenance algorithms that can optimise equipment repair, and cars that can drive themselves. However, even as AI creeps deeper and deeper into our everyday lives, serious questions remain about artificial responsibility. In an interview with Newsweek, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google said:"AI is one of the most important things that humanity is working on. It's more profound than, I don't know, electricity or fire. They learn to harness fire for the benefits of humanity, but we will have to overcome its downsides, too. My point is AI is really important, but we have to be concerned about it," AI uses existing data to make predictions, such as taking logs of previous service centre calls to automatically predict the correct response to give to customer questions.