Finextra’s inaugural NextGen AI conference kicked off at London’s Sancroft Conference with Lord Chris Holmes of the House of Lords delivering a headline keynote speech entitled ‘AI in 2024: The State of the Art’. I did.
Lord Holmes outlined the need to ensure legislation that governs AI innovation and fosters AI development in the UK, and how AI is impacting financial services governance.
“Whether in financial services or in any other area of our economy or society, we have the best chance of achieving optimal results if we always look to combine the golden combinations of inclusion and innovation. “I think you’ll get it,” he began.
Mr Holmes stressed the need to address social, democratic and economic issues regarding AI. AI will transform every sector – Holmes cited examples of AI innovation in medicine and personalized learning, but also the spread of misinformation during elections, deepfake fraud, and bias in AI models. He also pointed out the negative effects of
Holmes then outlined the AI bill proposed in Congress. This bill is designed to further foster trust, transparency, accountability, accessibility, international cooperation, innovation, and inclusiveness in AI legislation. “We needed to enact legislation in this country to address the opportunities and challenges of artificial intelligence.”
Mr. Holmes outlined three key provisions of the bill.
The need for smaller, nimble, and agile horizontal AI authorities to help larger regulators identify AI bias. Have an AI officer in every organization who is responsible for the ethical implementation of AI. Holistic public engagement – Effective public engagement and trust are essential to realizing the full benefits of technology.
Holmes continued that human-driven AI could democratize financial services and improve the balance between the interests of consumers and financial providers, creating a future of human-driven AI.
“Successful businesses will understand their business well and then think about how AI can help their business, rather than thinking about how AI can help them with what they are trying to accomplish,” he said. “Will it be incorporated into the system?” he concluded.
In the second morning session, Clifford Chance attorney James Wong delivered the keynote address, “Where is AI now?” Wong began by documenting a short history of AI technology. It begins with the birth of automation during the First Industrial Revolution and traces its history through what is now primarily considered the Fourth Industrial Revolution. He talked about how AI began as a footnote in the digital revolution started by the Turing Test proposal and the 1956 Dartmouth Conference, and how machine learning was developed in the 1990s and survived many winters before leading to the AI boom. . present day.
“With advances in deep learning, neural networks, and generative AI, we are now in a situation where AI is integrated into so many aspects of daily life. AI is not a new technology. It’s been built iteratively for a decade. It’s a mature technology that has survived two winters and now settled into its orbit, serving not only researchers but also enterprise users. It’s a very exciting juncture.”
Wong emphasized that new technologies always have both opportunities and opposition. With AI, financial institutions are well-positioned to take advantage of these opportunities, but “new opportunities quickly bring new harm to the surface.” Wong said new technologies always come with disruption, and public opposition to AI needs to be considered and acknowledged. listed.
“If we are to learn from the past, we need to recognize that change is disruptive and that the days when we could adopt innovative new technologies and leave behind traces of destruction and anarchy are long gone. We need to be conscious of the impact the AI we build and deploy has on individuals, communities, and society.”
However, Wong emphasized that AI is unique to other new disruptive technologies throughout history, making four points:
Creative capabilities – AI can enable previously unimagined breakthroughs in medicine, scientific research, and more. Cross-domain versatility – The general-purpose applications of AI are much broader than previous technologies and previous generations of AI. Speed and scale – Generative AI is unique in its ability to analyze and synthesize vast amounts of data quickly and efficiently. Adaptability – AI improves over time and with use.
“These are the special factors that make AI a foundational technology for the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” Wong said.
Wong explained that there are two important persuasive forces in the issue of addressing AI risks: “AI safety” and “AI ethics.” Safety focuses on the more remote but more systemic dangers of AI technology. Ethics then focuses on more fundamental and immediate issues such as fairness, privacy, accountability, and accountability. He says that in any given situation, there will often be more people in one camp than the other, but it’s important to consider both when considering AI governance, and to address more pressing issues as well. points out that it is important.
Wong then referred to the “code is law” principle proposed by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig in the 1990s, and hypothesized that software code is a form of regulation that determines people’s behavior. While Lessig mentioned the building blocks of the Internet, Wong emphasized how his observations are still valuable today.
“The concept of ‘code is law’ is a powerful tool for considering how digital systems increasingly integrate into our daily lives and shape how the physical world works and how humans behave as biological beings. It’s a useful lens.
