An exclusive interview with Noel Sharkey

Following his well-received talk at the Malta A.I. and Blockchain Summit conference, we sat down with eminent professor Noel Sharkey for an exclusive interview.

“Regulation isn’t about inhibiting or stopping your creativity, it’s about showing you how to enable it,” - Noel Sharkey.

Sharkey struck a positive yet cautious note as he looked back over the great technological upheaval the last 50 years has seen. While generally positive about the benefits AI will bring our changing world, he warned that our biases are influencing technology.

“We’re also seeing a massive problematic area of algorithmic decision making, where it’s becoming very apparent that its gender biased and racially biased. What we have at the moment is an evolving society, our norms are changing.

"We’ve changed a lot but unfortunately the data locked in our internet ossified there is not changing and that’s what we’re using to train these systems.

“A.I. can work really well a lot of the time, but when it makes a mistake, boy does it make a mistake. It goes right off the rails. So, I want human deliberation on those kinds of decisions (such as for medical care). In the political sphere, I worry it could destroy our democracy not save it, because we’ve seen all the stuff with fake news, we’ve seen the collection of Facebook data and using it to manipulate populations.”

Watch the interview in full below.

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