This talk discusses the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Digital Transformation. Despite the plethora of ethical guidelines, design methodologies, international standards, and even international regulation, AI is still being used (and is going to be used), as a tool for abstracted power and abnegated responsibility. The talk will consider a range of threats in the form of “Untrustworthy AI”, which can potentially bring about democratic backsliding, a kind of “digital feudalism”, and even diminish the very essence of “being human”.
It will suggest that in addition to cybersecurity, which addresses external threats, we also need cybersafety to contend with insider threats.These insider threats pose less risk to physical resources and more to cognitive resources and socially-constructed values.
Jeremy Pitt is Professor of Intelligent and Self-Organising Systems in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London (UK). His research interests focus on developing formal models of social processes using computational logic, and their application in self-organising multi-agent systems for engineering cyber-physical and socio-technical systems; some of this work won two Best Paper awards from the original SASO Conference. He has been an investigator on more than 30 national and European research projects and has published more than 150 articles in journals and conferences.
His book “Self-Organising Multi-Agent Systems: Algorithmic Foundations of Cyber-Anarcho-Socialism” was published by World Scientific in 2021. He is a Fellow of the BCS and a Fellow of the IET, and a member of the IEEE. He completed his second and final term three-year term as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine in 2023, where he wrote extensively on the societal impact and ethical implications of unrestricted Artificial Intelligence.