The Scottish AI Summit took place at Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh this week to explore achievements in the field made by Scotland while also taking pause to plot the course of artificial intelligence’s future as the tech industry becomes more reliant on its capabilities.

Central to this was marking the one-year anniversary of the Scottish AI Strategy, which has provided a blueprint for turning Scotland into an AI powerhouse.

But chief among the strategy’s goals is ensuring that AI develops in line with the principles of being trustworthy, inclusive, and ethical.

As such, the summit explored how Scotland, and other countries, can maximise the social and economic benefits of AI while staying true to these core tenets.

AI Ambitions

In the day’s opening address, Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy Kate Forbes warned that it is not inevitable that AI will develop ethically and be used for ethical purposes. It requires a conscious effort to make it so.

“In the whole debate around AI there are probably few things as important as ensuring that we secure the public’s trust in this beginning phase. That is absolutely essential if we are to fully unlock the potential of AI,” she said.

The strategy provides a vision and an opportunity to make Scotland a global leader in the ethical use of AI.

“And as the strategy acknowledges, we already have so many strengths on which we are building,” she added.

With the Scottish AI Strategy turning one, the summit marked the launch of the State of AI Report. This provides an account of the progress made in delivering the strategy’s actions over the past year.

“Our approach to achieving the ambitions set out in Scotland’s AI Strategy was all about catalysing collective action and strengthening the ecosystem we have here through our AI Alliance,” said Albert King, Chief Data Officer at the Scottish Government Albert King.

In addition, the event marked the launch of the Scottish AI Playbook. With the AI Strategy setting out actions to develop AI, the Playbook provides advice and guidance about turning the strategy’s principles into practice.

As a living asset, it is open to everyone to add to, ensuring advice and best practices are shared from across Scotland’s tech ecosystem.

“Naturally, and in keeping with the Scottish Government’s commitment to service design we’ve had a very strong focus on user research and stakeholder engagement,” King added.

Scotland and AI

However, celebrating past achievements was only half of the Scottish AI Summit. It also examined what next steps would be taken next for the country to develop AI, and the challenges it would have to overcome.

These include a digital skills gap, governance, regulatory issues, as well as evolving the business ecosystem.

Two areas where benefits go hand in hand with challenges are healthcare and law enforcement.

In healthcare, for example, AI offers a range of positive impacts. These include the power to analyse huge amounts of data and make the predictions to help with diagnoses, assisting with surgery or even the simple automation of administration.

At the same time, AIs use highly sensitive data about patients’ health. And when people’s live are at stake, the room for error, or the damage that can be done by bias, is incredibly high.

This is mirrored in law enforcement. In his talk, Head of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotic at UNICRI Irakli Beridze discussed some of the challenges of using AI to fight crime.

He noted that humanity will have stored 175 zettabytes of data by 2025. According to him, law enforcement will not be able to handle the sheer volume of data without assistance from AI.

Promising technologies for police forces include facial recognition and predictive policing systems. But with these come serious risks for society – mass surveillance, gender and racial bias and profiling.

If used improperly, not only can AI erode human rights, but it will undermine public trust in law enforcement and erode the basic principles on which the law is based.

“The main goal is that we will continue to work building a world where crimes are better prevented, investigated and prosecuted with the help of artificial intelligence, but in a way that respects human rights and the rule of law principles,” Beridze said.

Back to Business

With the emphasis on the importance of collaboration and developing Scotland’s ecosystem, business will play a key role in supporting the next phase of Scotland’s AI journey.

A strong network of private sector organisations will help drive the technology forward, turning innovations into useable, commercial products. In addition, it will create high quality jobs and attract skilled immigrants to Scotland.

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However, there are multiple challenges to fulfilling this potential. While AI-driven companies can create high quality jobs, Scotland still lacks many of the skills needed to fill these positions.

Funding is an issue as well, especially for early-stage companies and those with first-time founders. Incubators that help smaller companies develop their offerings with established partners need to be created to help startups turn into scaleups.

And legislation and regulations are needed to ensure that there are ethical pathways to accessing and using the valuable data needed to train AIs.

And through all this, AI needs to be developed responsibly. Time and again, the speakers emphasised how fairness and inclusivity has to be designed from the ground up. It can’t be bolted on at the end.

Fundamentally, AI does not exist without people. It needs to be designed to support everyone in a society. As such, the human element must always be at the centre of any vision for the technology.

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