EP 67 The Weekend of AI – part one (with Chris Stokel-Walker and Ellie Howard) Shelf Life#19

Leila Johnston (0:09)

Welcome to The Library of Mistakes, changing the world, one mistake at a time.

Welcome back to Shelf Life. This is the first of a very special pair of episodes that we're creating to promote the Weekend of AI that's happening at the end of this month. And we're very excited about it, aren't we, Fraser?

Chris Stokel-Walker (0:29)

We are. Great line up of speakers organized by Robbie Mochrie, and we're going to hear from two of them in this episode.

Leila Johnston (0:43)

Robbie, can you introduce these fantastic speakers, please, and also tell us a little bit more about why people should come to the Weekend of AI, what's in store, and just generally hype it up a bit.

Robbie Mochrie (0:56)

Well, that's easy to hype it up, but in fact, it doesn't need hype. This is going to be fantastic. That's just the way it is.

What we're doing, we're putting together a set of conversations. It's the Library of Mistakes, so as you'd expect, there's going to be something pretty serious in the conversation. There will be a little bit of history. I think you can expect some philosophy as well, plenty of ethics, and that's one of the reasons that Ellie's here, to talk about security and governance. We'll be starting off right from the beginning though. One of the things that we realized from holding events before is that people don't really know what AI is. I think that Chris is probably going to be very helpful in the first conversation that we're going to have, talking about just what AI can actually do. I suppose I should introduce our speakers as well as the event, just to say that Chris Stokel-Walker, he's a journalist, he's an academic, he's an author.

When I was thinking about this, I thought, well, I really need to go and get a list of all the books that he's written, and then I counted five. YouTubers, TikTok boom, the history of the Internet and bite-sized junks, how AI ate the world, and now fake news, a pocket primer. Chris has been pretty good at actually picking up over the last decade or so, exactly what it is that is happening in the digital world, and with AI just the latest variation of that. I'm looking at Ellie's LinkedIn CV, and yes, she started with political economy at King's College London. Perhaps the most important line, of course, on her CV is that she's on the steering committee of the Library of Mistakes, but she has worked in many ways. She's clearly an expert in raising capital, in developing business organizations, helping them to grow and undertaking a whole range of business activities. But now, working as a non-executive director and asking hard questions about how we can actually use AI. So those are all the things that we've got in mind. It's great to have both you both here, Chris and Ellie, and I guess that the easiest thing for me to start off, I'll turn, well, in fact, Ellie, I see you're not muted, so I'll turn to you first.

Really the question that I'm wanting to think that I'd like you to start talking about is, we hear so much about AI risk. Where do you see it as being important when we're thinking about businesses?

Ellie Howard (3:49)

Wow, that's a big question to start, Robbie. Thanks to you all for having me.

I think there's two quite distinct types of AI security risks, specifically. One, I suppose, arises from misaligned agents. This is the scaremongering and the existential dread that we have about being taken over by swarms of chatbots and so on. Then I think there's a separate type of risk, which is what we might term as bad actors using AI. That might be cyberattacks on businesses or organizations where AI is being utilized by people.

Then of course, those are probably a whole cacophony of other risks in terms of people actually adopting AI within businesses and some of the challenges around that. We know, for example, that I think it's quite rare to have a phone call in a business these days without it being recorded by some application on a computer. There's all sorts of legal risks and concerns that likely arise there. I think if you're an employment lawyer today, probably quaking in your boots. Those would be the different ways that I would characterize that risk in terms of running businesses or building businesses that focus on these different areas. One of the areas that's really interesting to me is how we actually evaluate those risks and what that means for both risk management internally in businesses but also things like underwriting and insurance and how that actually flows through to the market in terms of the risk that's held on different balance sheets of investors in companies. I suppose that gives a bit of an overview of some of the things that are on my mind at the moment.