In light of our upcoming event on Artificial Intelligence, we invited Aral Balkan, Cyborgs Rights Activist, to be our guest writer on the blog and write us a small article about it.

‘The “intelligence” bit of artificial intelligence comes not so much from the algorithms we use (which, for the most part are very simple), but from the huge amounts of data that we feed these systems in order to train them. The algorithms, in the case of a neural network that can learn to recognise hand-written letters with >96% accuracy are no more complicated than basic matrix multiplication and can be written in less than 50 lines of Python code. It is the amount and quality of data we feed the network – in the shape of samples of hand-written letterforms – that are the greatest factor in determining the behaviour of the system in recognising new, previously-unseen letterforms in the future. So the intelligence of AI comes from the data. Which brings us to the fundamental question of our time: where does the data come from? Who owns and controls the data? And, furthermore, who owns and controls the algorithms by which we derive insight from and begin to make predictions based on the data?