Associate Prof Alistair Knott, of the department of computer science, will be giving a public talk, organised by the Wanaka branch of the Royal Society, next Friday about AI and the effect it is having, and will have, on our lives.
Prof Knott trained at the world’s first department of artificial intelligence, at the University of Edinburgh, and has had more than 25 years’ experience in AI research, developing human language modelling in computers. He said speech processing and recognition in computers was now very good but "we are a long way from having a conversation with a computer".
However, we had created algorithms that allowed computers to do many jobs humans could do, including writing stories for newspapers.
"This is a really good example of where we have to ask ourselves, do we want to have machines writing weather forecasts, news stories and sports stories?" he said.
Prof Knott has been involved in the ethical and social implications of AI throughout his career.
In 2016, he co-founded the AI and Society discussion group at the University of Otago.
This year, together with Colin Gavaghan, from Otago University’s Faculty of Law, and James Maclaurin, from the department of philosophy, he is co-ordinating a project funded by the New Zealand Law Foundation to study how AI and the law will interact and what sort of legislation may be needed in the future.
He said it was hard for the law to keep pace with emerging technology, as it was moving so fast.He compared where we are now with AI with the time when theoretical physicists discovered nuclear energy and the nuclear bomb and realised they had invented something that had enormous consequences for society.He said the rapid developments in AI "frightened" him.
"Imagine, if we made a machine that can do everything a person can do, what role would there be for a person? Steven Hawking has said it would probably be the single most important event in the history of the human race and it would be a game-changer."
He said we needed to create mechanisms that allowed people involved in AI technology to be "upskilled in social consequences".
He said there were cases where we had decided to regulate technology, such as cloning, but with AI "we have not really had that discussion yet".
Prof Knott will be speaking at the Presbyterian Church Hall, Tenby St, at 6pm on Friday, August 4.
This story was not written by a computer.
