Panel discussion: Responsible AI in an era of transformation

Welcome back, everyone. Now, really exciting. We're mixing things up a bit. We've had speakers, we've had talks. Now we're going to have a panel discussion. I've got next to me three experts in their fields. I'm not going to include myself in that at all. I'm actually going to ask them to introduce themselves - because they can do it much better than I can. I'm going to jump over and ask Anne to begin.

Well, you've picked the weirdest person - because I'm the weirdest person. I've got multiple hats. I'm CEO of a learning development company called Strategically Green. I'm the author of O'Reilly's book Building Green Software. It's about how the tech industry will align - with the future of renewable power. The weird thing that I'll hopefully be adding - some thoughts to this panel on - is that I'm also the author of a science fiction series - about AI and the future of technology called the Panopticon series. That's my slightly weird take on this panel today. Hello, everyone.

My name is Lofred Madzou. I'm a global expert on AI governance. I've been in this field for the last nine years now. I started off working for the French government. I'm one of the co-drafters of the French AI National Strategy. Then I worked at the World Economic Forum, advising many governments and businesses on responsible AI. More recently, I was working at a startup called TruEra - in the AI observability space, for those of you who are familiar. We were acquired by Snowflake last year. I was the director of strategy, and now I'm an independent AI governance consultant. Awesome. And yes, Peter.

Hi, everyone. My name is Peter. I work for Moonpig and I lead our AI function there. It's basically on the applied side, introducing AI in various different ways. You might have seen, I don't know if you're a customer, I'm curious, but we launched an AI sticker generator recently. That was my team working on that. It's really fun. Some interesting details we had to work through. Apart from that, before that, I was in financial services, working for a bank, so closer to the city, also working on AI applications.

Amazing. Thank you for joining us. The reason we've gathered these wonderful people - together with us today is to have a discussion on responsibility - when we're using AI and transforming our futures. I'm going to kick things off and ask the question. I'll start with Anne again. What is responsibility to you in this world now? What really comes to your mind and what are you passionate about? I think in terms of responsible AI, there are kind of two strands. There's how do we make it so that it isn't just broken. How do we make it so that it does the right thing? It does what we're expecting it to do. That's governance, testing, all that kind of stuff. That's really important. That's about changing the technology. What is equally important, in fact, even more important, - is changing us as consumers so that when we interact with technology, - and this is true not just of AI, but it's an extreme case, AI, - that we interact with it mindfully, carefully, - and we engage our brains.

The best example of this, I think the potential problems here is something that happened in the UK - that every single person in this room will know all about, - which is the Horizon scandal. Let's face it, it's an old-fashioned piece of technology. Basically, it's like a spreadsheet that says, - this person should go to prison, and everybody goes, - well, the spreadsheet said so. Let's put them in prison. Horizon wasn't even a convincing piece of software. Everyone knew it was full of bugs. Yet people were still happy to say, - well, Horizon says we should put them in prison. Let's put them in prison. AI will be so much more convincing, but it is still error-prone. It will still always contain errors. There's no way that you can take all the errors out of everything. We, as users, humanity, - has to be much, much better at not going along with it.

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