Name: AI for Humans with Rob McCargow
Uploaded: 2020-03-25T07:05:46.000Z
Duration: 45 min 12 s
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hi and welcome to the Machine ethics podcast this month I'm talking with rod

McCargow director of AI and PWC I met up with rod at PWC office in London and we

chatted about modeling unintended consequences, AI ethics audits, working

with dubious companies and intentions, what we should be teaching our children

and future careers a recipe for AI future mitigating job displacement and

other AI for good topics.  If you like this podcast then check out the other

episodes at machine-ethics.net or you can contact us at hello@machine-ethics.net

you'll find us at Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, to support the

podcast go to patreon.com/machineethics extended interviews reviews and

more my thoughts on the episodes and AI topics and news of the month, thanks

Hi Rob thanks for joining me on the podcast

thank you having week could you introduce yourself and what you do

absolutely so I'm the director of artificial intelligence at PwC in the UK

so our team is basically and tasked with applying the technology across the

breadth of our organization on both internal projects but also working with

that clients across all industry sectors on solving some of their hardest

business problems as well using different forms of AI and a lot of the

other things I'm involved with also involve working with governments around

the world on the impacts on national strategy and policy and as part of our

assets on the advisory board of the All Party Parliamentary Group on on AI

amongst other appointments yes so it's been said that you're the nicest man in

AI how'd you feel about that depends who said it well it's just first I've heard

so on that point Robin to you kind of what is AI when you're talking about AI

what are you talking about more specifically well I think it depends on

the the audience that we're dealing with at the time and if we're working with

clients across different corporate functions across HR for example and

compliance maybe we don't necessarily get into a deep deepest of technological

descriptions but for me I think it's a high level to differentiate from

technology of old technology that falls into the AI domain of technologies that

can sense think act and through an iterative feedback loop learn and they

clearly sit as interesting bedfellows along more mature technologies such as

robotic process automation for example but we tried to focus across the breadth

of the main AI technologies but if I'm being candid the very first thing I do

in any of these things is state that I keep the job title to get me into the

room but the first thing I do is say they are doesn't really exist we have

this assembly of really interesting technologies on the pinnate from machine

learning and deep learning to natural language processing and generation and

other techniques that make up this AI family yeah so so the AI of

kind of science fiction doesn't exist necessarily but you've got this kind of

suite of things which go under that banner at the moment indeed yeah

great and we were talking briefly before but kind of how does PwC fit in with

this how they're talking about a I and and what they're doing in anyway I guess

as well well I think where right now is we've seen amazing breakthroughs of the

technology in in consumer use cases in use cases of fascinating utility but not

necessarily a huge amount of consequence on people's lives

so there's fantastic things being served up through iron maps or movie

recommendation engines and all sorts of ecommerce types of applications I think

where we're starting to see businesses in for example heavily regulated

industries healthcare financial services banking insurance et cetera criminal

justice starting to wrestle with this technology realizing that this has a

profound impact on their business they have to get moving on starting to

embrace and adopt but by doing so this opens up this whole cupboard of new

risks which I'm sure we'll get into over the course of the conversation today so

for us I think because we're already working with just about every

organization across the across the land it's some capacity are the auditing or

advising them in some capacity we're often on-site there is the trusted

advisor to help debunk some of the myths ology provide the right level of comfort

and confidence around the tech and allow them to get started and start moving a

pace with the innovation offered by AI so I see you a lot at

these sorts of conversations that you mentioned the kind of what happens when

you have these sort of technologies in those places in healthcare in the

justice system oh there's something like top-level I mean obviously this machine

at these forecasts and we took up a lot about this sort of things is there some

of the things which you're keen on like things that you are interested in

talking about in terms of those sorts of ethical issues yeah I mean I think be

more led by the you know the explosion in these events that I get the privilege

to go and speak at and and I think judging by the Q&A after them the two

areas that seem to elicit by some comms severable distance the most interest and

the most inquiry first of all I think is around the impact on the workforce

through automation through human machine interaction and through education skills

and future proofing of careers yeah I think that's one big category that

always creates huge amount of interest and then anything else that falls into

that AI ethics bucket is again of significant interest and and that's for

me is is a fascinating area and as we start seeing this started to scale in in

these use cases of significant consequence this brings a whole level of

interest across the breadth of different corporate functions to make sure that

people are fully conversant with the implications on their business yes II

think it's really important that those business leaders are appreciate the

technology and they might not have a low level understanding but if they're going

to apply it then they better well know what they're applying yeah this this is

now an absolute necessity rather than a nice-to-have this is a fundamental

prerequisite for a four up for a executive C suite member of a board for

example because this these specific use cases will more often not rear their

head in their departments and I think the one that I found very interesting to

look at and make sure that we're clear focused on are some of the the HR

applications you and I monitor this the press and the media quite a bit around

keeping up to date and what's happening and the ones that seem to constantly

rear their heads like social media where we first met I think are are those sort

of ones around recruitment for human performance type of monitoring systems

and as a consequence you know people like HR directors absolutely have to get

to grips with this technology and quickly yeah

or and there's some stories there of how that's been negative or like done not

necessarily really badly but like in a you know kind of good and evil sort of

way but like dubiously something that maybe we don't want to promote

thing and there's the Amazon example comes to mind about having you know

promoting men in their CV machine learning tactics and things of that and

because of past bias data than this little thing so it's really about

getting around that sort of Missy misunderstanding

maybe not the malicious use but like a stupidity in these high stakes arenas