WEF Davos: Who Will Own The Knowledge Produced From “Our” Data By Machines?

Artificial intelligence has succeeded the Internet of Things or the earlier cloud mania as buzzword number one at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum that started today (17 January) in Davos, Switzerland. While ethical questions surrounding the intelligent machines are discussed at length and the question for regulatory steps considered, answers of who will own the knowledge created by machines or intelligent bots vary.

Explaining the case for “cognitive” health care expert and diagnostic systems developed at IBM Watson, IBM CEO Ginny Rometty said when businesses put data sets accumulated by them into the AI systems, “insight that comes out of it belongs to you.” Also businesses would have to know how the cognitive system had been trained. Only then “as a result you see some trust growing in this.” To train the systems in health care, there is a need to tap massive data sets from experts and doctors – and ultimately patients – worldwide, though.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described the approach of his company as an attempt not to create AI, but make the underlying technology available to everybody. Microsoft which as well as IBM joined with several big players (including Google, Facebook and Amazon) in a “partnership for AI” last year, has developed several AI systems, Nadella said, for example language translation for Skype. Recently 100 people speaking in ten different languages had been able to talk to each other over Skype, he said. The goal for the next phase was to make “tools so others can create intelligence.”

Discussions in Davos illustrated that the exact definition of what constitutes artificial intelligence remains fluid. Rometty underlined the fact that it was not man or machine, but a “rather symbiotic relationship” with machines augmenting what humans could do.

Concerns over AI

Concerns over AI listed in this year’s WEF Global Risk Report on the other hand range from massive job losses to intelligent machines to the danger of automatic warfare. “It may be tolerable for a bug to cause an AI mobile phone application to freeze or misunderstand a request, for example, but when an AI weapons system or autonomous navigation system encounters a mistake in a line of code, the results could be lethal,” the report notes.

Plus, machine learning algorithms could “also develop their own biases, depending on the data they analyse.” Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, where basic research on AI is done, reported that one African-American student found out that many face recognition systems had a bias in not recognising black faces – just because they were trained by white male researchers in the first place. Ito made an appeal to AI companies to integrate engineers, lawyers and experts in ethics in the build-up of the systems, not afterwards.

On Trade Wars, Protectionism and Populism

With Chinese President Xi Jinping using a special opening ceremony to promote free trade and open streams for goods and capital – a classical US topic – quite a few WEF participants felt the world was upside down apart from machines taking over.

Xi, in a speech which drew a lot of applause from business and policy leaders present in Davos, said China had had its ups and down with joining the World Trade Organization. But the country which continues to see relatively high growth rates (6.7 percent expected for 2017) will stay on course and not return to the harbour of the “ocean” of the global market. “When you return to the harbour each time you face problems, you never reach the other side,” Xi said.

Without mentioning the US, he expressed hope countries would keep the door open for Chinese goods and capital and at the same time also sent a warning: “No one will emerge as a winner in a trade war.”

The trend to populism, potential re-nationalization and protectionism dominates political discussions in Davos. Inequality in income and wealth distribution is given as an important factor for people turning to populist politicians – many business leaders now insist that economic growth has to be accompanied with inclusiveness.

 

Image Credits: WEF, WEF