Artificial Intelligence (AI) in London

I agree. I think AI is a very powerful technology and its relevance and importance is slowly becoming more visible and obvious to non specialist audiences including large sections of the general public.

For what its worth, I think AI, specifically machine learning, and image classification are massively helpful and have provided benefit in terms of faster and more robust analysis of medical images. I attended a workshop at the University of Oxford. The performance of various image classification and decision support systems was demonstrated. AI has a lot of use cases, particularly in oncology and certain aspects of radiology. I am pleased to see this as a use case as there is real benefit for people which would have not been the case without the technology. 

I think AI use raises a lot of thorny issues. Namely which groups of people have access to or even understand the technology at a deeper level in terms of programming, algorithm design and implementation. One scenario which is possible but I now think is now more utopian is that AI is used to improve healthcare (e.g precision medicine) health services, public services and education / work / career development. 

Without more widespread discussion and legislative change their could be significant harms.  

AI Hallucination is a big issue and some large companies in the legal sector have been "caught red handed" so to speak confidently asserting non existent case law to support legal claims. 

I think critical thinking in terms of accurately assessing AI claims will be come clearly important over time. Particularly in sensitive work domains / in the professions.  

To answer the other question: Maybe the benefits of AI are that it will get rid of tedious jobs and politicians and CEOs alike will somehow transform character, and return profits to create a universal income for all citizens. So we can live lives of leisure, spend more time with family and friends, and less time working. 

I mean. I think AI has significant potential, both for better or worse. In a positive scenario AI and associated systems could provide significant acceleration of medical science and scientific development more broadly. This is already happen and AI has demonstrated its impact with scientific innovation by the likes of companies like DeepMind in terms of successfully predicting protein 3d structure that has benefits for medicine, biotechnology and linked scientific domains.

I have consistently seen slightly more worrying cases in the world of work. I read online that several of the "Big 4" accountancy have significantly decreased graduate recruitment.

On the front page of City AM today (20th May) its stated on the front page that "Standard Charted has announced plans to slash almost 8,000 back office roles, stoking fears about the wide scale threat of artificial intelligence poses to the global job market".

I feel sorry for graduates and young people more broadly. There are several factors that have come together at the same time which means competition for jobs is substantially higher than in the recent past. 

There needs to be reasonable opportunities for young people to gain in demand skills for the labour market and to improve their employability.