The opportunities AI can provide are “endless” but we must remain “cognisant of the risks” it poses, according to recent comments from a Regius professor in computer science.
Dame Wendy Hall, director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton and board member at Digital Jersey, said that the “fascinating thing” about AI was its “yin and yang” element, in that it offered “fantastic opportunities” but also presented risks.
Dame Wendy is one of the world’s leading experts in AI, having written her first AI code in 1984 and being called upon by Theresa May in 2017 to write a review of how AI could be used for economic growth and job creation in the UK.
She outlined the potential risks of AI: “It doesn’t always give us the right answer for a start. It could go rogue, and down the line, there could be really dangerous threats from AI.
“We have to be very cognisant of the risks while pushing to make the best use of it to get those new breakthroughs,” she warned.
Said breakthroughs would be seen in science, health, education and in “dealing with the major challenges in the world”, so using it to an advantage required keeping a “balance”.
“You can’t say, ‘let’s freeze AI till we know it’s not dangerous’. You have to let it evolve,” she argued.
“If you hadn’t invented flight, there wouldn’t be any plane crashes. When you get these big technological revolutions, bad things do happen. You need to be prepared. You need to learn from them, so they don’t happen again in the future.”
We have to be very cognisant of the risks while pushing to make the best use of it to get those new breakthroughs
Dame Wendy Hall
She acknowledged that AI was “very profound” because it “seeped into everything” and presented “ethical and moral dilemmas”, especially concerning AI in the “wrong hands”.
“AI can be used very badly and do us harm. What happens when the bad guys get hold of it, or AI weaponry is used in war or cyber crime?”
Dame Wendy assured that this was unlikely with the stage development AI is currently at.
“At the moment, AI doesn’t know where it is and what it’s doing. It’s just predicting the next word, so there’s not an immediate threat of death by AI in terms of the existential threat,” she added.
Dame Wendy’s comments come after the Institute of Directors Jersey published a white paper that urged the Government of Jersey to take action to develop a “future-ready workforce”.
Business leaders have called for reform to Jersey’s education system and workforce policy to keep up with fast-changing advancements in technology and artificial intelligence.
Recommendations included the integration of AI literacy, cybersecurity and “digital ethics” into the school curriculum, alongside critical thinking and collaboration.
Dame Wendy believes that AI will “change the whole way we think about writing in the future”.
“You have to make sure [students] still understand what they’re writing about rather than getting AI to write an essay that the student doesn’t read through properly.
“Check, make sure they understand what they’re handing in,” she said. “It’s the same as if you are given a maths exam and you put it into a calculator and just submit the answers without checking or understanding the context in which the question has been asked.”
AI’s prevalence, Dame Wendy agreed, required the kind of policy the IoD campaigned for in its white paper.
“We have to, of course, be teaching our kids in schools to use it wisely. [A policy] is a very important thing and we are doing that – how can we have a policy on the website for how our students and staff should use generative AI?” she said, referring to her role at the University of Southampton.
“But what you don’t want is to say to people ‘you can’t use it’. We’re not looking for a ban. We’re looking for a policy that says, ‘this is how you should use it’.”
We have to, of course, be teaching our kids in schools to use it wisely
Dame Wendy Hall
Dame Wendy emphasised the importance of the use of “responsible AI”.
“A friend of mine, Dr Sue Black, says responsible AI is governance plus education. That’s the [phrase] I like to use for people who use AI, develop AI, sell products using AI.
“We still need to think about everybody being respectful about what they do,” she said.
And helping people understand what AI “is and isn’t”, Dame Wendy noted, was an important consideration.
“It’s so it doesn’t seem like a piece of magic that you can’t control. If you’ve got an understanding of how it works, then you’ve got more appreciation of the fact that it’s not as scary as it seems,” she added.