Or perhaps, “Are we electronic sheep dreaming of rules for the wolves of Silicon Valley?
AI is already making important decisions about our lives, in insurance, healthcare, shopping, politics and government but because we don’t know which decisions they are making let alone why, we are afraid. We don’t want a world where AI confuses men of colour with gorillas, where women find out they are pregnant by algorithms spotting a pattern in their shopping or where our pay is determined by algorithms written by unaccountable geeky white heterosexual cis males… like our after-dinner speaker Dominic Connor.
Dominic Connor
As well as being current President of the Real Time Club, Dominic Connor has done nearly every job in IT, from grunt programmer on a failed AI project at BT, through debugging Microsoft operating system code for IBM, directing the building of a secure wide area network for HM government, lecturing in advanced programming, head of IT in a bank, founder member of the VB User Group, Test Director at PC Magazine, contributor to The Register, City headhunter, vice chair of the Conservative Technology Forum, printing circuit boards for the military and despite his questionable views on fuzzy logic and lambda calculus Queen Mary College felt it had no alternative but to give him a degree in maths and computer science.