{"id":92774,"date":"2018-06-13T11:02:30","date_gmt":"2018-06-13T11:02:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mostafa.openonline.co.uk\/?guid=ac415f23376558c7b44bb96536c430ca"},"modified":"2018-06-13T11:02:30","modified_gmt":"2018-06-13T11:02:30","slug":"speech-artificial-intelligence-from-alan-turing-to-the-industrial-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mostafa.openonline.co.uk\/?p=92774","title":{"rendered":"Speech: Artificial Intelligence from Alan Turing to the Industrial Strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Thank you, Stephen, for the introduction. Your work as a board member at BEIS has been of huge value, as has your contribution to this industry and many other spheres of public life.<\/p>\n

It is fantastic to be here at the world\u2019s largest AI<\/abbr> Summit for businesses, which now in its third year is going from strength to strength. Quite apart from the range and reputation of our sponsors, the 10,000 visitors expected over the two days is testament to just how engaged and passionate the AI<\/abbr> community is.<\/p>\n

Almost 70 years ago to this day, in July 1948, just 15 miles upriver from here, a document (I have a facsimile here to show you) landed on the desk of the National Physical Laboratory \u2013 then, as today, the UK government\u2019s leading research lab \u2013 that would be my nomination for the greatest research report ever written. The title: \u201cIntelligent Machinery\u201d. The author: Alan Turing.<\/p>\n

It is breath-taking in its vision, confidence, intellectual fizz and prescience. I recommend all of you interested in AI<\/abbr> to read it.<\/p>\n

Alan Turing had discovered brilliant theoretical results in logic at Cambridge. Then, during the war, in pursuit of an overwhelmingly important national mission, he had become the most brilliant and innovative code-breaker, not only building machines, but also a team that continues to be legendary. At Bletchley Park, high theory merged with wires, transistors and solder to crack urgent real-world problems.<\/p>\n

Then after the war the National Physical Laboratory recognised the extraordinary winning combination of practical, theoretical and human intelligence in the person of Turing and set him on his future path of building machine intelligence.<\/p>\n

And here we are today, in direct descent, with a renewed understanding that the momentous potential of the AI<\/abbr> and data revolution will bear full fruit when all of us \u2013 brilliant scientists, businesses as setters and solvers of real-world problems, investors as risk-takers, and government, as enabler, coordinator and partner, all come together.<\/p>\n

That is why I have developed our country\u2019s Industrial Strategy<\/a>, and I am very pleased that many of the companies and institutions in the room today have come together to define an AI<\/abbr> Sector Deal with government \u2013 it is just the start of a deep and rich relationship, and already it has committed over \u00a31 billion in investment.<\/p>\n

The changes that AI<\/abbr> is bringing are epochal.<\/p>\n

There aren\u2019t many moments in human history when a technology turns up that changes everything. Agriculture \u2026 the wheel \u2026 the printing press \u2026 then steam, chemicals, oil, electricity; then the micro-processor. And we are living through one of those moments now. In 2017, when the London-based DeepMind beat Ke Jie, humanity\u2019s best Go player, a symbolic date entered the history books.<\/p>\n

So why is AI<\/abbr> quite so revolutionary?<\/p>\n

Because previous technological revolutions discovered specific ways to improve human lives; this revolution has discovered automatic ways of discovering more. Thus the power to improve the lot of humanity is unprecedented.<\/p>\n

No wonder there are \u201cSingularity-mystics\u201d in California who believe this is taking us rapidly towards Starship Enterprise. Well \u2026 I\u2019m certainly all for the \u201cEnterprise\u201d bit, even the starships of our space program, but I\u2019m not sure about the singularity. An instance, perhaps, of the British pragmatism, empiricism and understatement that has proved its worth in science and business.<\/p>\n

The extraordinary transformations this implies are not pie in the sky, they\u2019re not \u201cflying cars tomorrow\u201d. They are happening, as attested by so many of the amazing ways that the businesses in this room are already using AI<\/abbr>.<\/p>\n

Whether it is Professor Rose Luckin making a robotic teaching assistant that takes the drudgery out of routine marking and administration \u2026<\/p>\n

or Rolls Royce – I look forward to hearing from Neil Crockett their Chief Digital Officer \u2013 building autonomous ships \u2026.
\nWhether it\u2019s Improbable \u2013 our latest UK -bred unicorn ($500m raised from Softbank. congratulations! ) \u2013 building the most sophisticated general purpose simulations of reality ever seen \u2026<\/p>\n

Memrise, a language learning app who I heard just yesterday had raised \u00a311.5 million \u2026
\nor indeed Quantaxa, harnessing the value of huge databases to combat financial fraud<\/p>\n

Whether it\u2019s RAVN automating the dullest aspects of document control in a complex corporate legal process \u2013 no offence taken, I hope, from any lawyers in the room for the suggestion that not every aspect of the job is scintillating \u2026<\/p>\n

or a composer automating the orchestration of their latest symphony \u2026<\/p>\n

Whether it\u2019s Babylon \u2013 the UK-developed health triage robot revolutionising front line access to health in Rwanda \u2026
\n or Darktrace, the AI<\/abbr>-powered security company that is already used by 5000 global businesses to keep their networks secure \u2026<\/p>\n

I am genuinely in awe of the range, the creativity, the power, of what you in this room are doing and building.<\/p>\n

And the more I find out about how this technology works \u2013 how reinforcement learning in complex networks rewards one parameter or downgrades another \u2013 the more I am struck by the parallels between the economy \u2013 that somewhat complex system whose long-term health my department has much of the responsibility for – and an AI<\/abbr> system.<\/p>\n

Indeed, at the same time as Turing was writing in Teddington, Hayek, the Nobel prize winning economist who made London his home for many years was in his office at the LSE<\/abbr>, just 6 miles away from where we stand, working on his theory of the economy as a massively parallel social computer; individuals, companies and entrepreneurs were nodes that were endlessly locally optimising and feeding information to neighbouring nodes.<\/p>\n

So in a sense, we are all involved in an enormously complex large-scale network optimisation. Our Industrial Strategy is a crucial piece of that optimisation. We need to upgrade our economy \u2013 version 4.0 – for the great transformation that is coming, and we approach this task in the spirit of intelligent designers.<\/p>\n

We have set ourselves the grand challenge of putting the UK at the forefront of the AI<\/abbr> and data revolutions. The Prime Minister has announced our \u201cmoonshot\u201d mission of using AI<\/abbr>-powered early diagnostics to revolutionise cancer treatment in this country, with 20,000 more 5-year survivors by 2030. I hope that many of you in this room will be involved in reaching our ambition to increase survival probabilities for common cancers.<\/p>\n

But the opportunities of AI<\/abbr> run deep throughout our Industrial Strategy.<\/p>\n

Taking each of the 5 foundations in the Strategy:<\/p>\n

Ideas<\/h3>\n