Evolving risk - and regulation

On the agenda in #Riyadh for the UK/Saudi Great Futures event. This panel with Dr Alex Connock, Alex Bombeck and Dr Yasser Al Onaizan was packed full of rich insights… not always the case at such events. Here are some of the highlights from my transcript:

Re-skilling a workforce?

AI will offer more opportunities for collaboration in business, but that means that every level of the organisation needs to change and upskill, says Alex Bombeck:?

“...if you're going to still operate in the same org structures or operating models, you're really not going to get the benefit from it. So the retraining and re-skilling has to be as much in the minds of leaders to be curious about how else could this business run, not just try to insert AI into the structures that exist today.”

That point was built on by Dr Yasser Al Onaizan from SDAIA | ????? : “...with any new disruptive technology that ought to affect the job market. It's our responsibility to make sure that the net benefits [are] to society and to the workers.

“When you're talking about re-skilling, it's critical to re-skill people and make them a part of the success of the new technology… you don't want to keep people doing or keeping the same job just to keep their jobs because the promise of technology and automation and so on is that you take the repetitive tasks, and then you increase in the value chain.?

“Humans are extremely capable of doing more challenging things if you challenge them.”?

Feeding the machine

The issue is not simple training on tool use, added Dr Alex Connock, but training on understanding of the implications and risks of the use of AI. Dr Connock referenced the risk of generative AI use to create visual assets for advertising that might not be copyright cleared - the regulation has simply not been developed to respond to the technology.?

For Alex Bombeck from North Highland , the issue is not the tech but how to reframe the environment around it so that we can do better things and find new opportunities. For Bombeck, it’s important not to get fixated on ‘risk’ but think about how to structure the knowledge and share it.?

Balancing regulation and innovation

Dr Al Onaizan believes there’s a need to integrate privacy laws into wider regulation. “You want to ensure people are compensated for their efforts, but with copyright it’s important that the people coming up with regulation it’s important that the people coming up with the regulation do actually understand the technology”.

“Dealing with the technology perspective, that’s the easy part … it’s understanding what we as society decide what is acceptable and what’s not acceptable.”

Dr Connock posed the question of whether states have a choice - either lead on regulation OR lead commercially. “The AI business is so global that it will naturally tend to the countries that don’t over-regulate.”

Dr Yasser’s view: “Regulation is not necessarily detrimental to technology. If you do it the right way it could be a boost to technology because I think investment and trade likes to have clarity. They hate uncertainty more than they hate bad regulation.”?

“In terms of what Saudi’s approach it’s trying to balance three things - the rights of the state, the rights of the enterprise and the rights of the individual and that is key to making the right policies, to balance all of these things.”

Not just the data

We are in very new territory when it comes to regulation - some would say we’ve been here before with social media - trying to balance what we want to share in the future (and how we manage what’s been shared in the past). When it comes to risk, aside from regulation, Alex Bombeck says it’s about focusing on what outcome you want to achieve. “If you look at that from the risk perspective - we can argue about data and data privacy all day long but some of that data should probably be freed and some shouldn’t, but until we decide on and understand the applications, we’re having a debate about nothing, justs 1s and 0s.”

“Regulation is always a catch-up game,” added Dr Yasser, from SDAIA. “What is important is having the ethics and moral guidelines that guide our behaviour regardless of what the regulation is… we must have a moral compass when we talk about technology. So there are some boundaries that we should be putting in ourselves even if it is not the law.”

The balance for states is not ‘over regulating’ and driving technology and innovations away; but there’s a parallel pressing need for some global governance, as large language models become ever more powerful.