Living in a data obsessed society

Abstract

Modern Artificial Intelligence is powered by statistical methods and fuelled by large amounts of data. This reliance on machine learning enabled us to bypass the need to fully understand a phenomenon before replicating it into a computer, paving the way to much progress in fields as diverse as machine translation, computer vision, speech recognition. This approach is affecting also other disciplines: we call this the big-data revolution. For this reason, data has been called the new oil: a new natural resource, that businesses and scientists alike can leverage.

A new unified data infrastructure that mediates a broad spectrum of our daily transactions, communications, and decisions has emerged from the data revolution of the past decades. Modern AI and Big Data Technologies are so closely interconnected that it is not possible to have one without the other.
Along with great benefits, this approach comes also with many risks, some linked to the fact that an increasing number of activities is mediated by this infrastructure, including many decisions that affect individuals. Very often the valuable data being used is our own personal data.

New AI technologies permit this infrastructure to infer our inclinations and predict our behaviour for an increasing range of activities, whether social, economic or regulatory. As opting-out is no longer a realistic option, we must strive to understand the effects this new reality can have on society.

Machines making autonomous decisions in key parts of our infrastructure can lead to unintended bias, discrimination, and even have unintended effects on public opinion, or our markets. Regulation cannot be effective if we do not understand the interaction between machine decisions and society.

The current trend towards collection, storage, analysis and exploitation of large amounts of personal data needs to be understood, its implications need to be assessed, particularly those that will affect our autonomy, our rights, public opinion, and other fundamental aspects of our life.

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About the lecturer

Nello Cristianini is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bristol,

His current research covers the large scale analysis of media content
(news and social media), using various AI methods, and the social implications of Big Data and AI.
Cristianini is the co-author of two widely known books in machine learning, “An Introduction to Support Vector Machines” and “Kernel Methods for Pattern Analysis” and of a book in bioinformatics “Introduction to Computational Genomics”.

He is also a recipient of the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and a current holder of a European Research Council Advanced Grant