Mari Anne Bayliss, senior director of solution management at CyberSource, told Karen Webster that simply relying on machine learning as a weapon …

With so many of today's shipping operations automated, there is a tendency to take what the computer states as the absolute truth. But a computer is only as reliable as the data it's fed. This is especially true for vessels at sea because of the limitations to sending and receiving data in remote locations. Masters, under pressure to meet what is often a critical Required Time of Arrival (RTA), benefit most from a combination of computer output (specifically, the onboard software NaviPlanner BVS) and the advice of StormGeo's shore-based Route Analyst experts. Located in the UK and the on the East and West Coasts of the U.S., these Route Analysts have access to a plethora of data unavailable onboard, which makes their advice invaluable.

In the medium to long term, AI expertise must not reside in only a small number of countries – or solely within narrow segments of the population. Governments worldwide must invest in developing and retaining home-grown talent and expertise in AI if their countries are to be independent of the dominant AI expertise that is now typically concentrated in the US and China. And they should work to ensure that engineering talent is nurtured across a broad base in order to mitigate inherent bias issues. Corporations, foundations and governments should allocate funding to develop and deploy AI systems with humanitarian goals. The humanitarian sector could derive significant benefit from such systems, which might for example decrease response times in emergencies.

Somewhere around 1973, I watched the movie, Westworld; a science fiction story set in 1983 (that was the future then), where a robot malfunction creates havoc and terror for unsuspecting vacationers at a futuristic, adult-themed amusement park. It was one of the earlier films dealing with the issue of where you draw the line between what is real and what is not, and what could possibly go wrong. In this case, one robot (played by Yul Brynner) becomes independent of the controls embedded in the technology, which turns out to be the equivalent of a virus that ultimate affects the entire robot population, and complete mayhem breaks out. If you watch any of the HBO series, a newer version of Westworld is now playing, expanding on the idea from the original movie, but taking it even further into the area of artificial intelligence by empowering the robots with an ability to understand, reason, learn, and engage with humans as though they too are human -- making it almost impossible to tell the difference. Let's jump into our reality and think about the prospect of a work-related version of Westworld, where computers armed with artificial intelligence or machine learning, take over the human role; because that's a real fear in the mind of many people, "when will they replace me with a computer?"