AIFA in Fortune Magazine

Just before their keynote at CogX, AIFA president Dr Roeland P.-J. E. Decorte sat down for an interview with Fortune, on AI and regulation, with Chloe Taylor.

Read the article here: https://shorturl.at/ijBL4.

The piece includes five viewpoints, that of leading AI academic Stuart Russell OBE, NATO Assistant Secretary General David van Weel, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, former head of MI6 Alex Younger, and AIFA president Dr Roeland Decorte. Here's what he said:

“[Decorte] told Fortune on the sidelines of the conference that he was “worried the founder voice will get lost” as governments clampdown on artificial intelligence.

“The kind of things we’re seeing tends to be the same group of large corporates, academics, politicians, and policymakers [discussing regulation], and the actual AI founder is never really part of that conversation,” he said.

“AI is like any technology that has lots of potential—it can also be used for wrong. But in order for us to effectively regulate it you don’t just talk to the corporates who scale technologies or the academics who germinate them, you talk to the startups who try out the first commercial applications.”

Decorte also argued that once you reach the stage where a technology has been scaled by a corporation, it will already be “too late,” as the tech will have permeated the public—who can choose to use it “for bad or for good.”

“If you actually believe, like Elon Musk, that AI is a threat to the future of humanity, then the answer to that is not really just regulation, because the regulators will never have the expertise to actually even know what’s in an individual algorithm,” he said. “If your focus is on wanting to avert the Terminator, investing in Explainable AI is the natural route forward.”