The Real Danger of AI – and How to Avoid It
These fears are misplaced, says industry expert, Dr. Scott Zoldi, chief analytics officer at FICO, who is responsible for the analytic development of the company’s product and technology solutions. Dr. Zoldi — who is the author of 95 patents in the field, and is speaking about AI at a conference in Cape Town next month — says the biggest concern isn’t that there is too much AI today, but that adoption is going too slowly.
“There are a variety of barriers to wide-scale implementation of AI. Two of the greatest barriers are the lack of data scientist talent and challenges with the operationalization of AI. There is a huge shortage of qualified data scientists. Unfortunately, education institutions often err on the side of entry degrees vs. training scientists with PhDs with deep technical expertise, this problem is then exasperated by a lack of domain expertise. On operationalization, many organizations are dealing with legacy IT systems and architectures which are inadequate to build and deploy artificial intelligence solutions. The combination of data scientists with limited depth of experience (particularly in operational AI) and aged IT systems make the barriers high indeed.”
With the challenges highlighted by Dr. Zoldi, the big question is, how can barriers to implementation be overcome?
“The industry has already made some strides by use of open source to fill gaps in data scientist experience, although open source still requires that the scientist know when to use different algorithms and under what constraints,” says Dr. Zoldi.
“The next move is to use notebooks which orchestrate both open source, proprietary AI intellectual property, and operational AI software code for specific domains. These notebooks allow scientists to follow recipes and best practices which often can’t be learned in school or not available in organizations where the history of successful deployment of operationalized AI is limited or non-existent. To address the IT hurdles these notebooks increasingly are developed specifically with views to directly outputting operationalization AI and scoring systems, for example utilizing docker containers and Kubernetes to allow for ease of use of productionized components that are proven operational.”
South Africa Actions
In an effort to get ahead of the problems identified and highlighted by Scott Zoldi, South Africa is making efforts to educate its youth in the field of Artificial Intelligence from an early age.
A case in point is I-Innovate, an organisation that is dedicated to bringing 21st century learning to classrooms and communities through education programs, design thinking, and problem-based learning tools, equipment and resources. They work with partners across the country to bring global thinking and locally relevant programs and activities to children and communities across Southern Africa.
With technology advancing at a rapid rate, children these days need to have the skills that will enable them to work in a world that is technologically more progressive.
As learners learn and apply AI concepts, they are inspired to use them to find solutions to pressing community problems when it comes to food, agriculture, health, transportation and energy
Doing their part in East London, Eastern Cape, is Clarendon School for Girls who recently launched their ‘Discovery Centre’. The centre is equipped with innovative technology, including Sphero robots and a 3D printer. The centre is divided into six zones: innovate, exchange, discover, create, collaborate and present. Each zone is represented by different activities within the unconventional classroom. The centre aims to spark a greater interest in technological and AI progression that their students will later pursue professionally.
“The future of AI will definitely be good for humanity,” says Dr. Zoldi. “Already we depend on it for safer air travel, detection of payment card fraud, and to navigate our automobiles. Despite, its name, AI has only the simplest of parallels with human intelligence, related to how it learns and discovers patterns through making connections based on examples. We need to invest more in educating young and older data scientists on the nuances of AI in order to stretch it to its full potential for the betterment of humanity.”
Scott Zoldi will be presenting a keynote address on “Explainable and Ethical AI” at the upcoming FICO Forum in Cape Town on 30-31 July 2019.
To book your seat, visit https://bit.ly/2WLT7I1