At the intersection of business and technology, few voices are as influential – or as urgently relevant – as Professor Dame Wendy Hall. A pioneering computer scientist and one of the world’s leading authorities on artificial intelligence, web science, and data governance, Dame Wendy has spent decades shaping the digital world we now inhabit. Renowned as a top voice on ethical AI, she has been at the forefront of global discussions on how emerging technologies should be developed and deployed responsibly. As Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton and Chair of the Ada Lovelace Institute, Dame Wendy continues to champion ethical innovation and advocate for greater diversity and inclusion in STEM.
In this interview, Dame Wendy shares her expert perspective on how businesses can harness the transformative power of AI while ensuring it aligns with ethical principles and societal values. She offers practical guidance on navigating the opportunities and risks of generative AI, stressing the importance of human oversight and the need to view AI as an augmentative tool rather than a replacement for human intelligence.
Q: With AI technologies becoming increasingly adopted by businesses, how can organisations ensure they deploy these innovations in an ethical manner?
Wendy Hall: If you take, for example, face recognition. We still haven’t really worked out what the rules and regulations should be around when people can apply face recognition technology. Did anyone ask you whether you wanted the face recognition technology on your phone? You get offered it as a system download and then you can choose to use it.
Face recognition in surveillance – we all know this happens in China – but it is happening in a creeping way in Europe and the US as well. Our security forces are using them. On the other hand, I like the fact that there’s a CCTV camera in the car park at night, so I feel safer.
And all these new technologies, and the technologies that are going to come – new AI technologies that we have no clue what they are and how they’re going to be used – all these things have a good and a bad side. A yin and the yang, right? Benefits and threats. We must learn how to make the best use of the benefits for the good of humanity, for the good of society, for the good of ourselves, for the good of the business, and how to mitigate against the threats. That’s what we’ve got to learn to do.
Q: What guidance would you offer companies keen to leverage generative AI while preserving a sense of genuine human connection?
Wendy Hall: Generative AI is nothing to be frightened of. I think we will start to use generative AI, which is about having software that helps us write things, summarise things, argue about things.
I liken it to when calculators first appeared and everyone – shock horror – “How can we let calculators into the classroom? How can we trust the answers it comes up with?” Well, of course, it’s garbage in, garbage out as ever. Now we have a finance industry run by computers. All the old ways of doing things by hand, the ledger systems, have gone. But we’ve got more jobs than we ever had before in the finance industry, and we will see this around generative AI.
I think we’re all going to be very relieved not to have to write essays about things. It will help us be more creative. But you need to view it as an adjunct, augmenting what we do and not taking over, because it’s not clever enough to take over.
The advantages of having the system – just take the legal industry – summarising the huge amount of work that people have to absorb and then predicting whether to take a case on or not, whether you think you can win in this circumstance. I see a future where AI becomes part of the team that’s deciding how to deal with a legal case, or how to deal with a medical diagnosis, or how to deal with a problem pupil at school.
We will have teams, and AI will be part of that team. We’ll ask the AI questions, and it will come back with answers. But it’s important that we see it as something augmenting human intelligence, not taking control, because at the moment it can’t. We can’t trust the answers.
The data going into generative AI is very biased. If it’s being trained on the internet, a lot of it is incorrect. We have this lovely term “hallucinating” – it will make things up if it does not know the answer. We have to think of it as part of the team, part of what we do, and use it to help us be more productive, more creative and have a better working life.
Actually, maybe shorter work – maybe we’ll get a four-day week out of all this.
Q: What geopolitical dynamics are shaping the landscape of cyberspace today?
Wendy Hall: In the book I co-wrote with Kieron O’Hara, ‘Four Internets,’ we talk about the geopolitical forces that are causing the fragmentation of the internet today. The same geopolitical forces are playing out as AI emerges, being trained on the data that emerges from the internet.
In a nutshell: the US is where all the big Western companies are in the Western world. That is very market-force-led, because the big companies are on the west coast; they lobby the east coast in Washington to get the rules and regulations they need to help their companies make money. You are seeing that play out with AI today, where Biden had a meeting with the vice presidents of the big tech companies to talk to them about how we regulate AI.
Self-regulation – is that a good idea? We do not know. We can argue the issues around data protection, privacy, trust, and security, but we can only partially influence because the companies outside of Europe do not have to abide by these rules. It’s only when they’re trading within Europe that they have to worry about them. We have some soft power there, but we don’t have the market power they do in the US, and they’re moving further around the world.
Of course, you come to China, where we know their approach from the very beginning of the internet has been about using this technology firstly to help people communicate, but secondly – and perhaps more predominantly these days – for surveillance and control. We see that creeping into our world as well. I see threats to the democratic process, and autocrats do well in this sort of data control world. We’ve got to think very hard about what that means for us, our lives, and our businesses.
That is all underpinned by the original open internet, which is still there. The open protocols -TCP/IP – were invented over 50 years ago. That still runs. That is our internet number one. Then we’ve got the US, Europe, and China models on top of that. It’s how they all fit together. Can we keep the internet running technically with the global agreement on the technical protocols? Nothing works if we do not. We don’t have a global internet then. AI is running on top of that, and that is going to put further political pressure on this whole ecosystem.
