24.03 Liontrust Global Innovation Report - The Rise of AI 04.24 - Flipbook - Page 8
What evidence has got you most excited so far about the
potential of AI?
Well it’s been hard to sit there during the last year or so
and not just see that there’s all manner of exciting things
going on. Firstly, AI, and generative AI especially, has
the biggest benefit through allowing someone who doesn’t
have skills or experience to mimic the productivity of
somebody who does.
Sometimes it’s given the term “upskilling”, but it’s not really
upskilling because no one’s learning any new skills. It’s just
that the skills you previously had to acquire through years
of training have now been handed to you. Much like when
you’ve got a navigation app on your phone, you can
now perform at the level of a London taxi driver who has
acquired the knowledge. That’s an interesting set of effects
occurring all over the place now and it’s quite incredible.
For businesses, they’ll have an easier time hiring and
expanding and not be limited by the amount of training
or experience people have. We’re already seeing that in
areas like coding.
Secondly, it’s the extra stuff that AI is going to allow us to
do. People worry all the time about AI taking jobs. But as
far as I can tell, especially in the service industry, there’s
almost no one who hasn’t got other things to do if they
could just be relieved of some monotonous task or can
get it done a lot quicker. So I suspect that’s where we’re
going to end up. People are going to be able to do more,
they’re going to move to where the AI isn’t and we will
evolve our work much the same way as we did when we
first got a computer.
What are the most important things the government can do
on AI policy and what do you think the worst things are that
they might do?
It’s very tricky. I must admit, I’m a long-standing regulatory
economist and I’ve never seen such a negative reaction
and call to regulate a technology than I have for AI. And
for the most part, it’s purely on the basis of speculation.
We haven’t had AI do significant damage to something
yet. The danger is that you might regulate something and
squash an opportunity to apply AI that would have been
quite innocuous, and you slow down progress.
A reasonable approach to regulation for now is trying to
improve some of the practices by which we develop AI
models and understand what they are. I think companies
are doing that anyway. If you put out an AI-based
product, you are still subject to product liability laws so
you can’t just throw it out there without thinking about what
damage it could do, particularly when it comes to medical
applications and anything involving human safety and
human interactions that might be harmful.
What is your level of optimism for improvements in healthcare
through AI?
The opportunities for AI in healthcare are enormous and
there is huge potential to collect data, train models and do
randomised control trials. But the challenge is it’s potentially
held up by all manner of laws that limit our ability to do these
things. We’ve got existing regulations in health that are very
damaging to every single stage in the innovation process.
With AI, there’s also the potential problem that even when
8 - The rise of AI: Technology and Innovation Report
you finally get FDA approval, you are back in the regulatory
process every time you do a software update.
I can see a huge opportunity if there were one country that
cracked open the book and said: “We can grab this entire
industry if we just get rid of these barriers.” Because many
of the barriers are for the most part harmful.