AI – Neither Artificial nor Intelligent, but Complicated

The Counsel Connect+ roundtable focused on different angles surrounding the ethics of AI development, identifying the challenges from a regulatory, policy and a business perspective.

There is much commentary about how the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) is going to change the world, in some exciting and some challenging ways. So, what is AI? And what does it mean if you are sitting in the general counsel’s (GC) hot seat, determined to support your company’s success, while keeping on the right side of the line?

The important thing to understand about AI in its current form is that it is not a replacement for human intelligence, empathy, intuition, genius, etc. It is, in a sense, neither artificial nor intelligent. It is pattern recognition, something that has been around for thousands of years. What is different is that the patterns can now be recognised across extraordinary quantities of data – sometimes seemingly unrelated – and at extraordinary speed, driven by complex algorithms and unprecedented processing power.