Unlocking the Power of AI for All

Guest post on AI by Marc O’Regan, CTO, Dell Technologies Ireland.

Today many of us live part of our lives in the digital world and the amount that we interact with that digital world is increasing at breakneck speed. In the last few years, significant parts of our lives have moved entirely into the digital sphere, whether it is booking a taxi or holiday, managing our finances or reading the news.

New technologies, including artificial intelligence, will continue to offer significant opportunities to make more and more of our lives more straightforward. Data scientists and engineers are constantly working to devise solutions to everyday and complex problems and AI offers that opportunity.

For example, Dell Technologies is working on a project at the Customer Solutions Centre in Cork to bring high-tech diagnostics to ambulances, using AI to monitor a potential stroke patient’s facial expression to assess if they are having or about to have a stroke. And the power of AI is being harnessed in the manufacturing industry to optimise delivery routes, so operators can burn less fuel and minimise their carbon footprint.

As the technology develops further, it has the potential to bring improvements to every spectrum of society from better predicting the weather and offering more accurate warning systems to improving the ability of healthcare professionals to better understand the needs of the people they care for, to improving efficiencies in industry to free up time for critical thinking.

There is no doubt that artificial intelligence has the power to improve all our lives.

But the developments we have witnessed to date have highlighted some of the challenges this new innovative technology presents. We must ensure that technologists developing AI solutions are in no doubt that algorithms are developed without bias or ethical imbalance and include everyone’s ethnic, cultural, gender, age, geographic and economic diversity. This is complicated further when you consider that today’s world includes legacy data that was not concerned with diversity or equality. As these systems migrate to becoming automated, untangling and teasing out some of the inbuilt bias that exists is even more complicated.

However, the developments we have seen thus far in AI have given us all a glimpse of the profound improvements it can bring. Now that we have highlighted some of the challenges, we can ensure that innovators and technologists are collaborating to make certain that this transformative technology is developed without bias and for the benefit of all.