��Ī - Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh

Opinion: The AI Summit was a promising start – but momentum must be maintained

fpjl2 — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 13:41:59 +0000

Given the frenetic pace of AI development, the international consensus demonstrated at the AI Summit is much-needed progress, says AI expert Dr Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh.

Risks of using AI to grow our food are substantial and must not be ignored, warn researchers

jg533 — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 16:13:23 +0000

Imagine a field of wheat that extends to the horizon, being grown for flour that will be made into bread to feed cities’ worth of people. Imagine that all authority for tilling, planting, fertilising, monitoring and harvesting this field has been delegated to artificial intelligence: algorithms that control drip-irrigation systems, self-driving tractors and combine harvesters, clever enough to respond to the weather and the exact needs of the crop. Then imagine a hacker messes things up.

A new risk analysis, published today in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, warns that the future use of artificial intelligence in agriculture comes with substantial potential risks for farms, farmers and food security that are poorly understood and under-appreciated.

“The idea of intelligent machines running farms is not science fiction. Large companies are already pioneering the next generation of autonomous ag-bots and decision support systems that will replace humans in the field,” said Dr Asaf Tzachor in the ��Ī’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), first author of the paper.

“But so far no-one seems to have asked the question ‘are there any risks associated with a rapid deployment of agricultural AI?’” he added.

Despite the huge promise of AI for improving crop management and agricultural productivity, potential risks must be addressed responsibly and new technologies properly tested in experimental settings to ensure they are safe, and secure against accidental failures, unintended consequences, and cyber-attacks, the authors say.

In their research, the authors have come up with a catalogue of risks that must be considered in the responsible development of AI for agriculture – and ways to address them. In it, they raise the alarm about cyber-attackers potentially causing disruption to commercial farms using AI, by poisoning datasets or by shutting down sprayers, autonomous drones, and robotic harvesters. To guard against this they suggest that ‘white hat hackers’ help companies uncover any security failings during the development phase, so that systems can be safeguarded against real hackers.

In a scenario associated with accidental failure, the authors suggest that an AI system programmed only to deliver the best crop yield in the short term might ignore the environmental consequences of achieving this, leading to overuse of fertilisers and soil erosion in the long term. Over-application of pesticides in pursuit of high yields could poison ecosystems; over-application of nitrogen fertiliser would pollute the soil and surrounding waterways. The authors suggest involving applied ecologists in the technology design process to ensure these scenarios are avoided.

Autonomous machines could improve the working conditions of farmers, relieving them of manual labour. But without inclusive technology design, socioeconomic inequalities that are currently entrenched in global agriculture - including gender, class, and ethnic discriminations - will remain.

“Expert AI farming systems that don’t consider the complexities of labour inputs will ignore, and potentially sustain, the exploitation of disadvantaged communities," warned Tzachor.

Various ag-bots and advanced machinery, such as drones and sensors, are already used to gather information on crops and support farmers’ decision-making: detecting diseases or insufficient irrigation, for example. And self-driving combine harvesters can bring in a crop without the need for a human operator. Such automated systems aim to make farming more efficient, saving labour costs, optimising for production, and minimising loss and waste. This leads to increasing revenues for farmers as well as to greater reliance on agricultural AI.

However, small-scale growers who cultivate the majority of farms worldwide and feed large swaths of the so-called Global South are likely to be excluded from AI-related benefits. Marginalisation, poor internet penetration rates, and the digital divide might prevent smallholders from using advanced technologies, widening the gaps between commercial and subsistence farmers.

With an estimated two billion people afflicted by food insecurity, including some 690 million malnourished and 340 million children suffering micronutrient deficiencies, artificial intelligence technologies and precision agriculture promise substantial benefits for food and nutritional security in the face of climate change and a growing global population.

“AI is being hailed as the way to revolutionise agriculture. As we deploy this technology on a large scale, we should closely consider potential risks, and aim to mitigate those early on in the technology design,” said Dr Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, Executive Director of CSER and co-author of the new research.

This research was funded by Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc.

Reference
Tzachor, A et al: ‘Responsible Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture Requires Systemic Understanding of Risks and Externalities.’ Nature Machine Intelligence, February 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s42256-022-00440-4

Artificial intelligence (AI) is on the cusp of driving an agricultural revolution, and helping confront the challenge of feeding our growing global population in a sustainable way. But researchers warn that using new AI technologies at scale holds huge risks that are not being considered.

The idea of intelligent machines running farms is not science fiction.

Asaf Tzachor

sarawuth702 (iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Drone spraying pesticide on wheat field

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AI: Life in the age of intelligent machines

lw355 — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 14:00:18 +0000

We are said to be standing on the brink of a fourth industrial revolution – one that will see new forms of artificial intelligence (AI) underpinning almost every aspect of our lives. The new technologies will help us to tackle some of the greatest challenges that face our world.

In fact AI is already very much part of our daily lives, says Dr Mateja Jamnik, one of the experts who appear in the film. “Clever algorithms are being executed in clever ways all around us... and we are only a decade away from a future where we are able to converse across multiple languages, where doctors will be able to diagnose better, where drivers will be able to drive more safely.”

Ideas around AI “are being dreamt up by thousands of people all over the world – imaginative young people who see a problem and think about how they can solve it using AI… whether it’s recommending a song you’ll like or curing us of cancer,” says Professor Stephen Cave.

Much of the excitement relates to being able to leverage the power of Big Data, says Professor Zoubin Ghahramani. Without AI, how else could we make sense of the vastly complex interconnected systems we now have at our fingertips?

But what do we think about AI and the future it promises? Our perceptions are shaped by our cultural prehistory, stretching right back to Homer, says Dr Sarah Dillon. How we feel about the dawning of a new technology is linked to centuries-old thinking about robotics, automatons and intelligence beyond our own.

And what happens when we come to rely on the tools we are empowering to do these amazing things? Professor Lord Martin Rees reflects on the transition to a future of AI-aided jobs: what will this look like? How will we ensure that the wealth created by AI will benefit wider society and avoid worsening inequality?

Our researchers are asking fundamental questions about the ethics, trust and humanity of AI system design. “It can’t simply be enough for the leading scientists as brilliant as they are to be pushing ahead as quickly as possible,” says Dr Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh. “We also need there to be ongoing conversations and collaborations with the people who are thinking about the ethical impacts of the technology.

“The idea that AI can help us understand ourselves and the universe at a much deeper level is about as far reaching a goal for AI as could be.”

Inset image: read more about our AI research in the University's research magazine; download a pdf; view on Issuu.

In a new film, leading ��Ī University researchers discuss the far-reaching advances offered by artificial intelligence – and consider the consequences of developing systems that think far beyond human abilities.

The idea that AI can help us understand ourselves and the universe at a much deeper level is about as far reaching a goal for AI as could be

Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh

AI: Humanity's Last Invention?

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Preparing for the future: artificial intelligence and us

lw355 — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 09:00:13 +0000

AI systems are now used in everything from the trading of stocks to the setting of house prices; from detecting fraud to translating between languages; from creating our weekly shopping lists to predicting which movies we might enjoy.

This is just the beginning. Soon, AI will be used to advance our understanding of human health through analysis of large datasets, help us discover new drugs and personalise treatments. Self-driving vehicles will transform transportation and allow new paradigms in urban planning. Machines will run our homes more efficiently, make businesses more productive and help predict risks to society.

While some AI systems will outperform human intelligence to augment human decision making, others will carry out repetitive, manual and dangerous tasks to augment human labour. Many of the greatest challenges we face, from understanding and mitigating climate change to quickly identifying and containing disease outbreaks, will be aided by the tools of AI.

What we’ve seen of AI so far is only the leading edge of the revolution to come./system/files/issue_35_research_horizons_new.pdf

Yet the idea of creating machines that think and learn like humans has been around since the 1950s. Why is AI such a hot topic now? And what does ��Ī have to offer?

Three major advances are enabling huge progress in AI research: the availability of masses of data generated by all of us all the time; the power and processing speeds of today’s supercomputers; and the advances that have been made in mathematics and computer science to create sophisticated algorithms that help machines learn.

Unlike in the past when computers were programmed for specific tasks and domains, modern machine learning systems know nothing about the topic in question, they only know about learning: they use huge amounts of data about the world in order to learn from it and to make predictions about future behaviour. They can make sense of complex datasets that are difficult to use and have missing data.

That these advances will provide tremendous benefits is becoming clear. One strand of the UK government’s Industrial Strategy is to put the UK at the forefront of the AI and data revolution. In 2017, a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers described AI as “the biggest commercial opportunity in today’s fast-changing economy”, predicting a 10% increase in the UK’s GDP by 2030 as a result of the applications of AI.

��Ī University is helping to drive this revolution – and to prepare for it.

Our computer scientists are designing systems that are cybersecure, model human reasoning, interact in affective ways with us, uniquely identify us by our face and give insights into our biological makeup.

Our engineers are building machines that are making decisions under uncertain conditions based on probabilistic estimation of perception and for the best course of action. And they’re building robots that can carry out a series of actions in the physical world – whether it’s for self-driving cars or for picking lettuces.

Our researchers in a multitude of different disciplines are creating innovative applications of AI in areas as diverse as discovering new drugs, overcoming phobias, helping to make police custody decisions and forecasting extreme weather events.

Our philosophers and humanists are asking fundamental questions about the ethics, trust and humanity of AI system design, and the effect that the language of discussion has on the public perception of AI. Together with the work of our engineers and computer scientists, these efforts aim to create AI systems that are trustworthy and transparent in their workings – that do what we want them to do.

All of this is happening in a university research environment and wider ecosystem of start-ups and large companies that facilitates innovative breakthroughs in AI. The aim of this truly interdisciplinary approach to research at ��Ī is to invent transformative AI technology that will benefit society at large.

However, transformative advances may carry negative consequences if we do not plan for them carefully on a societal level.

The fundamental advances that underpin self-driving cars may allow dangerous new weapons on the battlefield. Technologies that automate work may result in livelihoods being eliminated. Algorithms trained on historical data may perpetuate, or even exacerbate, biases and inequalities such as sex- or race-based discrimination. Without careful planning, systems for which large amounts of personal data is essential, such as in healthcare, may undermine privacy.

Engaging with these challenges requires drawing on expertise not just from the sciences, but also from the arts, humanities and social sciences, and requires delving deeply into questions of policy and governance for AI. ��Ī has taken a leading position here too, with the recent establishment of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, as well as being one of the founding partners of The Alan Turing Institute based in London.

In the longer term, it is not outside the bounds of possibility that we might develop systems able to match or surpass human intelligence in the broader sense. There are some who think that this would change humanity’s place in the world irrevocably, while others look forward to the world a superintelligence might be able to co-create with us.

As the University where the great mathematician Alan Turing was an undergraduate and fellow, it seems entirely fitting that ��Ī’s scholars are exploring questions of such significance to prepare us for the revolution to come. Turing once said: “we can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”

Inset image: read more about our AI research in the University's research magazine; download a pdf; view on Issuu.

Dr Mateja Jamnik (Department of Computer Science and Technology), Dr Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh (Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, CFI), Dr Beth Singler (Faraday Institute for Science and Religion and CFI) and Dr Adrian Weller (Department of Engineering, CFI and The Alan Turing Institute).

Today we begin a month-long focus on research related to artificial intelligence. Here, four researchers reflect on the power of a technology to impact nearly every aspect of modern life – and why we need to be ready.

What we’ve seen of AI so far is only the leading edge of the revolution to come.

Mateja Jamnik, Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, Beth Singler and Adrian Weller

Jonathan Settle / ��Ī

The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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The future of intelligence: ��Ī University launches new centre to study AI and the future of humanity

fpjl2 — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 09:27:58 +0000

Human-level intelligence is familiar in biological “hardware” – it happens inside our skulls. Technology and science are now converging on a possible future where similar intelligence can be created in computers.

While it is hard to predict when this will happen, some researchers suggest that human-level AI will be created within this century. Freed of biological constraints, such machines might become much more intelligent than humans. What would this mean for us? Stuart Russell, a world-leading AI researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and collaborator on the project, suggests that this would be “the biggest event in human history”. Professor Stephen Hawking agrees, saying that “when it eventually does occur, it’s likely to be either the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, so there’s huge value in getting it right.”

Now, thanks to an unprecedented £10 million grant from the Leverhulme Trust, the ��Ī is to establish a new interdisciplinary research centre, the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, to explore the opportunities and challenges of this potentially epoch-making technological development, both short and long term.

The Centre brings together computer scientists, philosophers, social scientists and others to examine the technical, practical and philosophical questions artificial intelligence raises for humanity in the coming century.

Huw Price, the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at ��Ī and Director of the Centre, said: “Machine intelligence will be one of the defining themes of our century, and the challenges of ensuring that we make good use of its opportunities are ones we all face together. At present, however, we have barely begun to consider its ramifications, good or bad”.

The Centre is a response to the Leverhulme Trust’s call for “bold, disruptive thinking, capable of creating a step-change in our understanding”. The Trust awarded the grant to ��Ī for a proposal developed with the Executive Director of the University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), Dr Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh. CSER investigates emerging risks to humanity’s future including climate change, disease, warfare and technological revolutions.

Dr Ó hÉigeartaigh said: “The Centre is intended to build on CSER’s pioneering work on the risks posed by high-level AI and place those concerns in a broader context, looking at themes such as different kinds of intelligence, responsible development of technology and issues surrounding autonomous weapons and drones.”

The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence spans institutions, as well as disciplines. It is a collaboration led by the ��Ī with links to the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, Imperial College London, and the University of California, Berkeley. It is supported by ��Ī’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). As Professor Price put it, “a proposal this ambitious, combining some of the best minds across four universities and many disciplines, could not have been achieved without CRASSH’s vision and expertise.”

Zoubin Ghahramani, Deputy Director, Professor of Information Engineering and a Fellow of St John’s College, ��Ī, said:

“The field of machine learning continues to advance at a tremendous pace, and machines can now achieve near-human abilities at many cognitive tasks—from recognising images to translating between languages and driving cars. We need to understand where this is all leading, and ensure that research in machine intelligence continues to benefit humanity. The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence will bring together researchers from a number of disciplines, from philosophers to social scientists, cognitive scientists and computer scientists, to help guide the future of this technology and study its implications.”

The Centre aims to lead the global conversation about the opportunities and challenges to humanity that lie ahead in the future of AI. Professor Price said: “With far-sighted alumni such as Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, and Margaret Boden, ��Ī has an enviable record of leadership in this field, and I am delighted that it will be home to the new Leverhulme Centre.”

The ��Ī is launching a new research centre, thanks to a £10 million grant from the Leverhulme Trust, to explore the opportunities and challenges to humanity from the development of artificial intelligence.

Machine intelligence will be one of the defining themes of our century, and the challenges of ensuring that we make good use of its opportunities are ones we all face together

Huw Price

Sam Churchill

Supercomputer