On 16th November we celebrated the launch of Software Cornwall’s Festival of Tech with an exciting event at the Eden Project, sharing plans for the 2 week long festival with local businesses.
We were thrilled to be joined by tech trendsetter and TV presenter Georgie Barrat, who delivered a captivating keynote speech discussing the future of Artificial Intelligence.
There were many fascinating questions submitted by our engaged audience and Georgie has kindly answered some of those that we didn’t have time for on the day.
Will incomes grow?
Very good question and I’m not sure if I know the exact answer to it. I think productivity will grow and because of that incomes could grow but it depends how you’re measuring incomes over all. There is a chance people will lose jobs, which means their income completely stops. Are we looking at something like a universal living wage instead? These are the things we have to grapple with. I do think what we will see is that overall productivity will be more and that means there is more money generally being created. Whether that comes in the form of incomes or comes through the form of having some kind of universal wage given to you, I think we will be better off and more prosperous. You don’t need to just look at the wage side of things, people will generally have better health and education and better quality of life.
Ethics are selective, who decides?
That’s a very big question. I think it is probably the ethical debate that people have been having for thousands of years. I don’t think any one person should decide, we should be putting more research into what makes us tick as humans, what makes us happy, what gives us meaning in life. If you think of the budget that Apple spend on developing the iPhone, if they channeled 20% of that budget into what makes us tick as humans then we would have such a better idea of what’s right and wrong and what can better aid us as a species. Ultimately there will have to be many many voices playing into this conversation, lots of people need to be a part of this ethical debate. How do we make this happen? Again maybe legislation could play a role in this, we could ask companies to put that 20% of their research and development into looking into the ethical side of things.
How do we ensure and help education keep pace with developments?
This is hard because technology moves incredibly quickly, but there are tech companies who are using these tools in a really exciting way. If you look at the Khan Academy, they are doing some really interesting stuff with a personalised tutor chatbot that guides students through their work and helps answer any questions. The beauty of this large language model chatbot is that it’s specifically designed to help with students, it doesn’t just give them the answers straight, it helps with their thinking and helps drill down why they’ve come to that conclusion and guides them through that learning process much in the same way that a teacher would. Also they have these chatbots that can help teachers on the other side so they’re looking at how you can put together lesson plans, mark homework, help kids that need more 1 to 1 learning. We can use these chatbots in that way. How do we ensure we keep pace with it? We have to rely on these companies who are championing this tech and using it in really creative ways and using that as our guide.
Do you think personal GPT that is available on personal devices will be a bigger revolution than top down AI?
Yes I do, this is how we’re going to end up with all having these virtual assistants that will be our gateway to all this information online. We won’t use Google in the same way that we have, instead we’ll turn to the personal AI devices to help pull up the relevant answer or help find you whatever you’re looking for and help guide you through that course. Watch this space.
10 years ago, what did your ‘10 years time’ look like and did it include as much AI and XR involvement?
10 years ago I don’t think I was fully predicting what 10 years time might look like, I probably only really started thinking about the future in the way that I do now about 7 years ago. So the question is maybe 7 years ago was I thinking about the future and did it include as much AI? The thing that I was doing when I first started speaking about future technologies was breaking down the different areas of AI. I was saying we’d be using them for chatbots, we’d be using them for natural language processing so we could talk to them in that way. I was probably being a bit more specific about the ways AI would develop because at that point all those areas sounded exciting, whereas now they’ve become more every day. I was speaking about autonomous cars and how that will be driven by AI (literally). What I’ve also always said for many years but hasn’t quite seemed to come about yet, is that virtual reality will take part. But here we are in 2023 and I don’t think that there are many people who own a VR headset or use VR regularly and even though I’m a really big fan of VR I certainly don’t use it all the time. I think that’s one of the things that I’ve over-egged and said the metaverse is coming and that we’d be doing all this stuff in VR but here we are 7 years down the line and it still hasn’t quite been the year for VR.
Messy human decisions are regulated by human appeals processes to find justice, how could we ever appeal an AI judges decision?
This is one of the major problems about using AI as a judge in this way and I know this is referring back to one of the scenarios I gave during my presentation. This is where we need to get AI to be a little bit better, when we’re using things like chat GPT it’s not very good at giving us the source of where it got that information from, it just comes up with an answer and whether that answer is right or wrong there’s no being able to check it or look at the reference for it. However, we are starting to see chatbots that are specifically made for enterprises to be able to tell them and explain how the AI came to that conclusion and if we can be able to do that then maybe we can be able to go back and do an appeals process because we’d be able to see how the AI came to that decision and appeal against the different aspects of it. But it’s by no means perfect and it’s more of a scenario about how tech can do a better job than humans can even though you may prefer a human judge presiding over your case.
Isn’t technology hitting a limit as to how much it can be shrunk, and do you really think we’ll end up with micro technology on or within our body?
I don’t think tech is hitting a limit as to how much it can be shrunk, I think it’s obviously slowing down as it comes to Moore’s law which is a big thing when it comes specifically to that, we aren’t talking about how things will change when quantum computing comes along or what we can do with micro tech implants. Do I really think we are going to end up with micro technology in our bodies? Yes! Have you seen Zoe? That has taken the country by storm recently, it’s been heavily promoted on social media and this is a little device that you have continuously reading your bloodstream to work out how you process carbohydrates, sugars and other nutrition information and give you real time feedback as to what is going on in your bloodstream. This has been released really recently and and already there’s a huge waiting list for it and people really interested in seeing it so if that has become as popular as it is, and that’s pretty small and is constantly monitoring your bloodstream I don’t see any reason why if you add a few more years on to that we’ll see that happen more and more.
Do you have any thoughts on how we ensure the people who’ve created and owned the content that AI models are trained on are fairly rewarded and referenced?
I think that at the moment there’s not actually many people working on this stuff. I think the rewards are pretty obvious, which is that they have huge financial gains. And if you’re working in this area you are highly sought after and you are handsomely paid if you come up with one of these solutions. How do we ensure they are rewarded and referenced? I think there are many examples out there in business whereby you can create an incredible company or software or build a bridge and you aren’t always correctly rewarded or referenced. Nor do you have to be, the reward is in the building of it and paid for your work while you’re doing it so I’m not sure if it’s much of a problem.
In 10 years, don’t we need AI to help us solve our existential planetary problems rather than making us coffee, music or ordering 3 day clothing?
Yes I very much think AI needs to help solve the climate crisis and this is one of the major things we can put it to use for. It will help solve disease, help combat global warming, help come up with creative solutions, and help us move around our cities and the world a lot greener. So yes there are some amazing things that AI will solve, and it will also help us make coffee and listen to music.
At what point do humans fail to serve a purpose?
This is a big question and it certainly give thought to the fact that we are creating something that is going to be more intelligent than us and is going to be above us in the food chain and we’ve been used to being at the top of that apex for many many years now and ultimately AI is going to take over us and I don’t think we’re that far off that process. This is why we need to put guard rails around it and speak about the ethical implications of it. We need to make sure that engineers are creating it so that it doesn’t destroy humankind. These are all big scary questions but ultimately if there’s a real possibility and even if it’s a small possibility that any of these doomsday scenarios could come to fruition then we need to make sure we’re putting things in place to stop this from happening.
How long do you think it will be before AI is used to judge VAR decisions in a football match instead of the person as the fourth ref?
This is a brilliant question! I’m surprised there isn’t some kind of algorithm being able to look at these things, surely you’d be able to just program that into the pitch quite easily and not have a human make that decision. I think this is a brilliant example of how humans can be extremely unreliable with their decision making process and the real implications this has for football fans and their teams so yes surely this is going to be used or at least used as the main way of judging it and then a human can validate if AI has got it right.
Are you scared of AI taking your presenting job?
This is a very real question because I used to speak about AI and robots taking jobs and thought my job was pretty secure, but since then I’ve realised that is not the case because you can get some really good CGI computer generated presenters. I don’t think it would take away all of my work but it will certainly take away some of my work. Some of the jobs I get employed to do would be to literally go into a room with a green screen and read an autocue. Maybe it’s information about a company or a welcome video introducing someone to a virtual conference. Surely very soon i won’t be getting those kind of jobs through because it would be a lot more efficient and cheaper for the company to tell a piece of AI software to introduce this, say this and look like this, than it would to get me and film crew and a scriptwriter and will the people that are involved in putting together something like that. Having said that, and I think this applies to many jobs, people still like the human element of it. People still like to see me fluff my lines on stage or interact with a fellow human or answer a questions in a way that they weren’t expecting so I think don’t underestimate how the invaluable nature of humans and the fact is human speaking to another human will always hold value and people will always want to see that. So hopefully fingers crossed I’ll still have a job in 10 years time, maybe get back to me, and employ me if not!
Thank you so much for all of your questions.
Find out more about Software Cornwall’s Festival of Tech.
Cornwall’s Festival of Tech is a 2 week long celebration set to shine a spotlight on Cornwall’s thriving tech industry. From workshops and tech demos to expert talks and networking events, there are countless opportunities to get involved. For more details the exciting plans, visit the Festival of Tech website.
