Mind the gap: bridging innovation’s supply and demand in the AI era

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Speaker to be confirmed
• Tuesday 03 December 2024, 17:30-19:00
• Fitzwilliam College, Storey's Way, Cambridge, CB3 0DG.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Prof Diane Coyle.

Prof Neil Lawrence, inaugural DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge, will deliver this year’s Annual Public Policy Lecture: “Mind the Gap: Bridging Innovation’s Supply & Demand in the AI Era”.

Despite its transformative potential, artificial intelligence risks following a well-worn path where technological innovation fails to address society’s most pressing problems. The UK’s experience with major IT projects shows this disconnect: from the Horizon scandal’s wrongful prosecutions to the £10 billion failure of the NHS Lorenzo project. These weren’t only technical failures but a failure to bridge between needs and the provided solution, a failure to match supply and demand.

This misalignment persists in AI development: in 2017, the Royal Society’s Machine Learning Working group conducted research with Ipsos MORI to explore citizens’ aspirations for AI. It showed strong desire for AI to tackle challenges in health, education, security, and social care, while showing explicit disinterest in AI-generated art. Yet seven years later, while AI has made remarkable progress in emulating human creative tasks, the demand in these other areas remains unfulfilled.

This talk examines this persistent gap through a lens that’s inspired by innovation economics. We argue that traditional market mechanisms have failed to map macro-level interventions to the micro-level societal needs. We’ll explore why conventional approaches to technology deployment continue to fall short and propose radical changes needed to ensure that AI truly serves citizens, science, and society.

This talk is part of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Bennett Institute for Public Policy
• Cambridge talks
• Fitzwilliam College, Storey's Way, Cambridge, CB3 0DG
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.