Mitigating bias is AI’s biggest challenge yet
From financial services to healthcare, AI is being hailed as this generation’s Industrial Revolution.
And while the advent of automation has left many workers fearing that they’ll be replaced by a chatbot—recent data predicting that generative AI could impact as many as 300 million full-time jobs globally—the long term impact and implications of AI are more nuanced than job losses.
“It’s a revolution because the innovations in AI will persist,” commented Dr Patricia Scanlon the founder of Soapbox Labs and Ireland’s first government-appointed AI ambassador, at the recent Dublin Tech Summit.
“It will have an impact on society, the economy will be impacted, the global economy will be impacted and every industry will be impacted. And that’s really, really important to realise where we are today.”
At the event to deliver the opening keynote, Dr Scanlon spoke at length about the importance of regulation to ensure the sustainable and safe development of AI and argued that regulation doesn’t necessarily mean innovation will be stifled.
“There is this mindset, I’ve heard it a lot and I’m sure you all have, that regulation stifles innovation. If that was the case, I don’t think you’d see innovation in fintech, biotech and medtech in health care because they’re heavily regulated spaces, but people still manage to operate in them.”
She continued: “Misinformation and disinformation is a huge risk. We’ve seen it already on social media. Imagine doing that on scale. If we allow it to go unregulated, and nobody has to worry about misinformation, disinformation, you know, freedom of speech, whatever you want to call it, we could end up destabilising our own governments, because of the race in politics and people indiscriminately using these tools because they’re not regulation.”
AI and recruitment
One key area that Dr Scanlon highlighted as being a crucial component to AI’s success is mitigating bias. “No AI is biassed. AI is made biassed by the state of the data lazily pulled from the internet or legacy data,” Dr Scanlon says.
She points to gender gaps in hiring as an example. “For instance, with the last 40 years of employment data, who got the job? We’re trying to correct that in society but if you were to take legacy data and pull that into a model, you’re propagating that bias into the future.
“But if we build models right and we actually carefully design the models in the data, in the deployment, in how that makes decisions, you can actually create objective decision making as opposed to biassed decision making.”
Thinking about the future of your own career? The Peer2Peer Finance News Job Board is the perfect place to start your search. It features thousands of jobs in companies that are actively hiring, like the three below.
Complex and Enhanced Due Diligence Officer, Starling Bank, Manchester
As a Complex and Enhanced Due Diligence Officer you will be responsible for applying your expert investigative ability to analyse customer profiles in order to make recommendations that help Starling Bank effectively manage risk. You will have an expert understanding of enhanced due diligence practices, be able to complete risk assessments and provide recommendations. In this role you will have the opportunity to communicate with our customers and work closely with colleagues across the bank to ensure that best practices and processes are continuously assessed and improved upon. Get more information here.
CCB Underwriter – AVP, Citi, London
As a CCB Underwriter you will work alongside bankers in underwriting requests for new and existing clients with ownership responsibility for the end to end credit process. As such, you will lead credit due diligence with clients and perform relevant industry and peer analysis, prepare detailed written credit summaries by analysing the business, performing detailed financial analysis, interpreting the finance need, identifying the strengths and prevailing risk factors and rendering a final credit decision that meet the business risk and return goals. See the full job description here.
Lending Strategy and Pricing Graduate Analyst – Consumer Finance, Metro Bank PLC, London
Metro Bank has an opportunity for a Lending Strategy and Pricing Graduate Analyst to join its consumer finance team. Using coding languages (SQL, SAS, R, and Python) you will accurately extract information from the database, manipulate and use various tools to create high-level analysis, turn insights into stories in the format of slides, reports or emails, which you can share with stakeholders within and outside of the team, in writing or verbally and create robust pricing trials/tests in order to optimise the prices offered to customers, and assess the results using statistical approaches. View additional details here.
Article written by Aoibhinn Mc Bride at Amply