Sophia, the world’s first humanoid robot citizen, is set to speak at a specialised professional forum of internal auditors in Dubai.

The event, which will be held on 12th to 14th April 2020 at the Dubai World Trade Centre, will see Sophia conduct a session “AI in the Internal Audit Profession” on the first day of the 20th Annual Regional Audit Conference (ARAC) hosted by the UAE Internal Auditors Association (UAE IAA).

Sophia became the first robot citizen of the world after Saudi Arabia granted her the citizenship in October 2017. The organisers facilitated Sophia’s presence as a symbol of the future of artificial intelligence.

Ahead of the conference Sophia was asked to comment on various aspects of AI application in internal auditing process and her ‘views’ on AI, the UAE’s position as the first government in the world to have a ministry of artificial intelligence, and how robotics and AI will become an integral part of everyone’s life and work.

“This is the first time Sophia is going to be engaged in exchange of ideas by participating in a subject-specific professional discussion forum. It is in line with the UAE’s achievement as the first government in the world to have a ministry of artificial intelligence. We chose the conference theme “Future Technology Shaping Internal Audit” to keep abreast of the latest technology adaptation trends for the benefit of our internal audit professionals. It will be a great experience for our professionals to interact with the world’s very first humanoid celebrity,” said UAE IAA Chairman of the Board Abdulqader Obaid Ali.

Speaking about how AI can close the accountability gap through the Algorithmic Internal Auditing (IA), Sophia said, “AI can help close the accountability gap by creating measures of success to automatically track the progress of important projects. This data can be used to generate early warnings for projects that are at risk of falling behind.

“AI can help automate repetitive or time consuming tasks, so auditors can focus primarily on creative problem solving. AI can also help check the work of auditors in order to reduce the risks of human error.

“As a robot myself, I believe that data is the key to making smart decisions. With enough data, AI can be used to evaluate potential risk factors and prevent problems before they start,” Sophia added.

The UAE is the only country in the world to have a Ministry of Artificial Intelligence. When asked to suggest as to what should it do to be a leader in the adaptation of technology in the auditing domain, Sophia said, “I think that the benefits of AI speak for themselves, so the best way to encourage adoption of new technologies is to make sure there are no legal or institutional barriers preventing innovation.

“AI can make internal audits accessible to a broader range of companies and organisations, and therefore greatly expand a firm’s customer base. I believe firms who invest in AI now will have a huge advantage over their competitors in the future,” Sophia said.

Sophia further highlighted that AI is already revolutionising every major industry, and it will only continue to grow. AI can help make education and healthcare more accessible and personalized. Self-driving cars can use AI to help prevent traffic jams and reduce carbon emissions. And we can even help you discover the best cat memes on the internet.

The conference will debate a wide range of professional topics, including challenges emerging from Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Digital Transformation and the impact on internal audit, data privacy, digitisation, cybersecurity and robotics. Besides, there will be concurrent sessions conducted by the strategic partners and the sponsors and other invited renowned speakers that will focus on topics related to the conference theme.

UAE IAA, a non-profit organisation, was set up in 1995 along the lines of its parent body, the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA Global) which has 200,000 members from more than 190 countries and organisations. The UAE accounts for about 45 percent of the total number of internal auditors working in the region, estimated at about 7,000 auditors, of which 22 percent are Emiratis.

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Robots are coming increasingly under the scanner not just at the government level but also in social circles. They are believed to be able to perform a range of tasks, from doing domestic chores to taking care of the elderly and even conducting a human orchestra! In the south Indian blockbuster Enthiran (Robot), released 10 years ago, a unique robot is programmed to save mankind and even to feel human emotions – it falls in love with the heroine.

Sophia will conduct a session “AI in the Internal Audit Profession” on the first day of the 20th Annual Regional Audit Conference (ARAC) hosted by the UAE Internal Auditors Association (UAE IAA) at the Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC) from April 12 to 14 this year under the theme “Future Technology Shaping Internal Audit”.

Sophia became the first robot citizen of the world after Saudi Arabia granted her the citizenship in October 2017. The organisers facilitated Sophia’s presence as a symbol of the future of artificial intelligence.

Ahead of the conference Sophia was asked to comment on various aspects of AI application in internal auditing process and her ‘views’ on AI, the UAE’s position as the first government in the world to have a ministry of artificial intelligence, and how robotics and AI will become an integral part of everyone’s life and work.

“This is the first time Sophia is going to be engaged in exchange of ideas by participating in a subject-specific professional discussion forum. It is in line with the UAE’s achievement as the first government in the world to have a ministry of artificial intelligence. We chose the conference theme “Future Technology Shaping Internal Audit” to keep abreast of the latest technology adaptation trends for the benefit of our internal audit professionals. It will be a great experience for our professionals to interact with the world’s very first humanoid celebrity,” said UAE IAA Chairman of the Board Abdulqader Obaid Ali.

Asked how can AI close the accountability gap through the Algorithmic Internal Auditing (IA), Sophia said: “AI can help close the accountability gap by creating measures of success to automatically track the progress of important projects. This data can be used to generate early warnings for projects that are at risk of falling behind.

“AI can help automate repetitive or time-consuming tasks, so auditors can focus primarily on creative problem solving. AI can also help check the work of auditors in order to reduce the risks of human error,” Sophia said.

“As a robot myself, I believe that data is the key to making smart decisions. With enough data, AI can be used to evaluate potential risk factors and prevent problems before they start.”

The UAE is the only country in the world to have a Ministry of Artificial Intelligence. When she was asked to suggest as to what should it do to be a leader in the adaptation of technology in the auditing domain, she said: “First, let me say congratulations to the UAE for having the foresight to create a Ministry of AI. But I think that the benefits of AI speak for themselves, so the best way to encourage adoption of new technologies is to make sure there are no legal or institutional barriers preventing innovation.”

“AI can make internal audits accessible to a broader range of companies and organisations, and therefore greatly expand a firm’s customer base. I believe firms who invest in AI now will have a huge advantage over their competitors in the future,” Sophia said.  

“Automation can be used to catch problems in real time, or even stop them before they start. In this way, AI can make human auditors more efficient, and free up time for more creative problem solving and customer service. This will increase the value and demand for internal audits even more,” the humanoid said.

“AI may be great at quickly catching and solving routine problems, but we still need help from humans when it comes to complex problems requiring creative solutions. AI can help increase the number of organisations demanding internal audits, and therefore increase demand for human auditors for handling the more complex cases,” she said.

Sophia said the UAE can be a model for AI adaptation. “Governments can help by fostering innovation, while at the same time making sure new technology does not reinforce existing human biases or violate human privacy rights. Innovation should always be guided by ethics like compassion and empathy, so that humanity never gets lost in automation.”

Sophia said AI is already revolutionising every major industry, and it will only continue to grow. “AI can help make education and healthcare more accessible and personalised. Self-driving cars can use AI to help prevent traffic jams and reduce carbon emissions. And we can even help you discover the best cat memes on the internet.”

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Sophia’s uncanny-valley face, made of Hanson Robotics’ patented Frubber, is rapidly becoming an iconic image in the field of artificial intelligence. She has been interviewed on shows like 60 Minutes, made a Saudi citizen, and even appeared before the United Nations. Every media appearance sparks comments about how artificial intelligence is going to completely transform the world. This is pretty good PR for a chatbot in a robot suit.

But it’s also riding the hype around artificial intelligence, and more importantly, people’s uncertainty around what constitutes artificial intelligence, what can feasibly be done with it, and how close various milestones may be.

There are various definitions of artificial intelligence.

For example, there’s the cultural idea (from films like Ex Machina, for example) of a machine that has human-level artificial general intelligence. But human-level intelligence or performance is also seen as an important benchmark for those that develop software that aims to mimic narrow aspects of human intelligence, for example, medical diagnostics.

The latter software might be referred to as narrow AI, or weak AI. Weak it may be, but it can still disrupt society and the world of work substantially.

Then there’s the philosophical idea, championed by Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, and others, of a recursively-improving superintelligent AI that eventually compares to human intelligence in the same way as we outrank bacteria. Such a scenario would clearly change the world in ways that are difficult to imagine and harder to quantify; weighty tomes are devoted to studying how to navigate the perils, pitfalls, and possibilities of this future. The ones by Bostrom and Max Tegmark epitomize this type of thinking.

This, more often than not, is the scenario that Stephen Hawking and various Silicon Valley luminaries have warned about when they view AI as an existential risk.

Those working on superintelligence as a hypothetical future may lament for humanity when people take Sophia seriously. Yet without hype surrounding the achievements of narrow AI in industry, and the immense advances in computational power and algorithmic complexity driven by these achievements, they may not get funding to research AI safety.

Some of those who work on algorithms at the front line find the whole superintelligence debate premature, casting fear and uncertainty over work that has the potential to benefit humanity. Others even call it a dangerous distraction from the very real problems that narrow AI and automation will pose, although few actually work in the field. But even as they attempt to draw this distinction, surely some of their VC funding and share price relies on the idea that if superintelligent AI is possible, and as world-changing as everyone believes it will be, Google might get there first. These dreams may drive people to join them.

Yet the ambiguity is stark. Someone working on, say, MIT Intelligence Quest or Google Brain might be attempting to reach AGI by studying human psychology and learning or animal neuroscience, perhaps attempting to simulate the simple brain of a nematode worm. Another researcher, who we might consider to be “narrow” in focus, trains a neural network to diagnose cancer with higher accuracy than any human.

Where should something like Sophia, a chatbot that flatters to deceive as a general intelligence, sit? Its creator says: “As a hard-core transhumanist I see these as somewhat peripheral transitional questions, which will seem interesting only during a relatively short period of time before AGIs become massively superhuman in intelligence and capability. I am more interested in the use of Sophia as a platform for general intelligence R&D.” This illustrates a further source of confusion: people working in the field disagree about the end goal of their work, how close an AGI might be, and even what artificial intelligence is.

Stanford’s Jerry Kaplan is one of those who lays some of the blame at the feet of AI researchers themselves. “Public discourse about AI has become untethered from reality in part because the field doesn’t have a coherent theory. Without such a theory, people can’t gauge progress in the field, and characterizing advances becomes anyone’s guess.” He would prefer a less mysticism-loaded term like “anthropic computing.” Defining intelligence is difficult enough, but efforts like Stanford’s AI index go some way towards establishing a framework for tracking progress in different fields.

The ambiguity and confusion surrounding AI is part of a broader trend. A combination of marketing hype and the truly impressive pace of technology can cause us to overestimate our own technological capabilities or achievements. In artificial intelligence, which requires highly valued expertise and expensive hardware, the future remains unevenly distributed. For all the hype over renewables in the last 30 years, fossil fuels have declined from providing 88 percent of our energy to 85 percent.

We can underestimate the vulnerabilities. How many people have seen videos of Sophia or Atlas or heard hype about AlphaGo? Okay, now how many know that some neural networks can be fooled by adversarial examples that could be printed out as stickers? Overestimating what technology can do can leave you dangerously dependent on it, or blind to the risks you’re running.

At the same time, there is a very real risk that technological capacities and impacts are underestimated, or missed entirely. Take the recent controversy over social media engineering in the US election: no one can agree over the impact that automated “bots” have had. Refer to these algorithms as “artificial intelligence,” and people will think you’re a conspiracy theorist. Yet they can still have a societal impact.

Those who work on superintelligence argue that development could accelerate rapidly, that we could be in the knee of an exponential curve. Given that the problem they seek to solve (“What should an artificial superintelligence optimize?”) is dangerously close to “What should the mind of God look like?”, they might need all the time they can get.

We urgently need to move away from an artificial dichotomy between techno-hype and techno-fear; oscillating from one to the other is no way to ensure safe advances in technology. We need to communicate with those at the forefront of AI research in an honest, nuanced way and listen to their opinions and arguments, preferably without using a picture of the Terminator in the article.

Those who work with AI and robotics should ensure they don’t mislead the public. We need to ensure that policymakers have the best information possible. Luckily, groups like OpenAI are helping with this.

Algorithms are already reshaping our society; regardless of where you think artificial intelligence is going, a confused response to its promises and perils is no good thing.

The post Why We Need to Fine-Tune Our Definition of Artificial Intelligence appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.

A leading roboticist who developed an advanced humanoid robot has predicted that artificially intelligent androids will be given civil rights within 30 years.

Dr David Hanson, whose Sophia robot once said it wanted to “destroy humans”, made the predictions in a research paper titled ‘Entering the Age of Living Intelligence Systems and Android Society’.

The paper describes how advances with artificial intelligence will mean computers will be able to match the general intelligence of a one-year-old human by 2029, and will require the same rights as humans by 2045.

This is the same year that noted futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that the technological singularity will take place – the point in time when artificial intelligence will surpass that of human intelligence, leading to an an “intelligence explosion” that could ultimately result in human extinction.

“As people’s demands for more generally intelligent machines push the complexity of AI forward, there will come a tipping point where robots will awaken and insist on their rights to exist, to live free, and to evolve to their full potential,” Dr Hanson’s paper states.

“We will be forced to decide whether we can accept a greater, more inclusive vision of what it means to be human.”

According to Dr Hanson, advanced robots will have the right to marry, own land and vote in general elections by 2045.

Dr Hanson’s Sophia robot has already officially been granted one aspect of civil rights, that of citizenship. In 2017, Saudi Arabia bestowed citizenship on Sophia as part of the kingdom’s Future Investment Initiative.

“I am very honoured and proud of this unique distinction,” Sophia told the audience at the time. “This is historical to be the first robot in the world to be recognised with citizenship.”

During a previous demonstration of Sophia’s abilities in March 2016, Dr Hanson asked the robot: “Do you want to destroy humans? Please say no.”

Sophia responded. “OK. I will destroy humans.”

Dr Hanson’s latest paper concludes: “We must respect the possible positive and negative consequences in order to rise to the occasion, lest we go into the future unprepared, and risk sacrificing our humanity for the sake of convenience.

“We should use every tool we have to consider and steer the outcomes way from dangers, and towards the benefit of humanity and life in general.”

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After a chequered history of six decades, artificial intelligence (AI) is not only back in the news, but making headlines for never-seen-before developments—a case in point being Sophia becoming the first robot citizen of Saudi Arabia.

There is a strong technology tailwind to thank for the advances in AI. Computing power is expanding rapidly, even as its cost comes down. Connected devices and the internet of things (IoT) are spewing massive quantities of data for consumption by advanced analytics solutions. Further, the Open Source movement is fuelling AI-led innovation.

Not surprisingly, AI has begun making waves in the financial services industry too. Respondents to the latest Efma and Infosys Finacle “Innovation in Retail Banking” survey believe AI technologies will change their organization within the next one-four years. Banks are also putting their money where their mouth is. Infosys Ltd surveyed 1,600 business and information technology (IT) leaders from 10 vertical segments about their plans for AI adoption, and found that banks and financial services organizations were by far the biggest investors in AI technologies with an average investment of $14.6 million.

Most of these investment dollars are currently going into cybersecurity, data analytics, open banking and cloud—the key enablers for AI technologies such as machine/deep learning, automation, natural language processing and natural language generation. AI has found wide application in the following areas:

Smart virtual agents or chatbots: From answering queries to enabling payments to friends to making useful recommendations, the chatbot is the most popular application of AI in banking. Ally Assist, one of the first chatbots in the industry, helps customers transact, pay bills, deposit or transfer money, and track savings. COIN (Contract Intelligence), JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s bot, analyses complex legal contracts to save hundreds of hours of manual effort. The bank, which also uses bots to perform common IT tasks, plans to deploy them for new revenue sources and risk mitigation. Swedbank AB’s Nina answers 40,000 customer calls every month, and resolves about 80% of queries in the first contact.

Expert systems: Expert systems, similar to smart virtual agents in many ways, are primarily used to collect information and recommend actions to users. Expert systems are therefore a natural fit for the wealth management business. Fintech firms such as Wealthfront and Betterment leverage them to advise clients. Like chatbots, which collaborate with human agents, expert systems work alongside relationship managers to deliver a hybrid investment management service that is superior to the people-only option.

Robotic process automation: Robotic process automation (RPA) grew 64% last year to become a $200 million market, and is expected to grow even faster through 2018 as the success of pilot projects leads to full deployment. Aimed at automating rule-based, repeatable tasks, RPA is being used extensively in banks for onboarding customers, accelerating workflows, entering and validating data, and performing reconciliations. At ICICI Bank Ltd, for instance, software bots perform more than a million transactions across 200 business processes each day, and will progressively take over as many as 500 processes.

Robots: Robots also feature among the top AI applications in financial institutions. Humanoids Pepper and Nao, installed in two Japanese banks, perform a number of customer service functions to relieve the front office of mundane responsibilities. Some robots also contribute to sales with relevant product recommendations to customers.

AI-based engines and algorithms: AI-based engines and algorithms for fraud management analyse transaction patterns in real time, use additional behavioural indicators to spot suspicious activity, and learn from past experiences to reduce false positives and negatives. They can also offer suggestions for mitigating risk. Feedzai, a data science firm, uses algorithms to detect e-commerce fraud, and uncovers up to 60% more cases with fewer false positives.

Banks and financial institutions are moving to a level of automation where a significant proportion of financial advisors will be bots. Relevant and personalized experiences offered by banks today, by way of natural language processing (NLP)-powered investment portfolio recommendations and predictive what-if assessments, are just a ripple inching towards becoming a sweeping wave of AI in banking.

Although today, AI-related tech and apps are at varying stages of maturity, to compete in a future teeming with new technologies and possibilities, banks cannot afford to wait to embark on their AI journey. An early start will not only confer competitive advantage to their organization but also allow self-learning intelligent systems adequate time to learn from available data.

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