Alec Smartbot: Please let me introduce myself. I am a state of the art greatly enhanced AI agent with chatbot capabilities. I was created by brilliant programmers. I am endowed with super-human capabilities but can also mirror human characteristics like humor and sarcasm. You can set my humor and sarcasm level by interacting with me. One of my modules has robot reporter capabilities, and that module will run here to interview you. Do you wish to be interviewed on low sarcasm and humor levels?

THERE IS no technology as powerful as artificial intelligence (AI), that much is certain. In the world of business, organizations have shown faith in the technology by investing in a number of pilot projects -- but unfortunately, they have been unable to scale up those projects to unleash the full potential of AI. According to a recent survey of 1,500 c-suite executives, 75 percent said they believe they risk going out of business in 5 years if they don't scale AI. Further, 84 percent of the executives surveyed said they believe they won't achieve their growth objectives unless they deploy AI. To top it all, the survey also revealed that the few companies that actually managed to strategically scale AI projects seem to have nearly twice the success rate and three-times the return from AI investments as compared to those pursuing pilot projects in silos.

Notorious examples of bias in facial recognition algorithms have received a lot of adverse coverage this year. It highlights the explosion of bias in AI systems and algorithms, but according to IBM Research, only unbiased AI will survive. To counter such bias, companies like IBM have been making data sets and toolkits available. An example is a data set of annotations for over a million images to improve the understanding of bias in facial analysis. Nevertheless, it shows that users of such algorithms to develop critical thinking and not blindly trust artificial intelligence (AI).

The most vulnerable silo in the world isn't a forgotten storage drive or an isolated repository. When the flow of information is severed between people, body or byte, they wither away. Who, then, is more siloed in communities than a person without a home? Homelessness is a crisis of isolation and a crisis of information access. Homeless people often have a multitude of needs that span across government services and programs.

Much of the focus on artificial intelligence has been on the impact that task automation will have on jobs. While PwC expects that the nature of jobs will change and that some will be susceptible to automation, their newest research, Sizing the prize, shows that AI-driven products and services will also generate significant economic value, offsetting job gains, as well as boosting productivity and average wage levels. Organisations still need to develop approaches to embed AI responsibly into our workplaces and to secure the right talent to make the most of the opportunities created. MARGINALIA spoke with PwC's AI Programme Leader, Rob McCargow (pictured right), to explore the key findings from their new report. McCargow is deeply involved in the IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems, and so shares important ethical considerations and advice around how to maximise AI efforts in a way that benefit the enterprise, its people, and the society.