Artificial intelligence conferences are all the same. All? Not necessarily. In any case, not when one of the main guest speakers publishes, to illustrate once and for all the issues surrounding technology, a comic book on the subject.
Christiane Féral-Schuhl will be in Montreal next Monday to participate in the Influence Summit, a conference organized by the technological incubator Zù, founded by Guy Laliberté. The event focuses on the challenges of developing ethical and responsible artificial intelligence. We see everywhere on the planet that AI is a powerful tool, capable of supercharging both beneficial applications and those more harmful to the economy, society or education.
Me Féral-Schuhl is an author and lawyer specializing in digital law. She was the first woman to president of the Paris Bar. She defended Internet giants at a time when people connected to them by telephone modem. In short, she has developed a detailed knowledge of the issues linked to new technologies, which she has embodied for several years in the form of a person called Adélaïde.
For the “AI generation”
“Digital is still very abstract,” she said in an interview with The duty. “To capture the public’s attention in my conferences, I created this character, Adelaide, which I use to illustrate the excesses. It allows you to tackle more concrete situations — it’s much more fun than boring PowerPoints…”
His meeting with a young colleague, lawyer and illustrator, led to the publication this month in France of a comic strip: Adelaide. When artificial intelligence breaks the codes (Dalloz).
“The comic raises the question of the excesses of artificial intelligence in our daily lives,” she explains: a 35-year-old young woman lives in an intelligent, connected, collaborative city, very respectful of the environment, very concerned about well-being and security of citizens. Everything is run by an AI that Adelaide’s family will have to deal with. It demonstrates that as artificial intelligence becomes integrated into human activity, it will become increasingly difficult to criticize it.
“In 10 years, people born with AI in their bottle, what will be their ability to counter the algorithm? What will be their ability to identify deviations? » asks Me Féral-Schuhl. The answers will have to come quickly: courts of justice in Europe and Asia are already automating certain judgments using algorithms which are suspected of conveying certain biases.
Who will have the audacity to challenge these judgments when artificial intelligence is omnipresent? asks the Franco-Canadian author. “We quickly land on the ground of equity: each person is unique, each context creates a singularity that we lose as soon as we switch to AI,” she says.
Hence the appearance of Adelaide. Because sometimes, contrary to the adage, we need to have a drawing done.
An AI responsible… for what?
With this edition of the Influence Summit, Zù takes up a very fashionable theme these days in the technological world: that of ethical and responsible artificial intelligence. Okay, but responsible for what?
Dimitri Gourdin, general manager of Zù and organizer of the event, cites the increasingly frequent imposition of ESG criteria – environmental, social and governance – as a condition for investment in new technologies. “Technology for technology’s sake, there is too much of it. Can we do it for the advancement of humanity? » he asks somewhat rhetorically. “We have seen enough of entrepreneurs who aim for quick gains. Rather, we are looking for entrepreneurs who want to change the world. »
Open to the public, the Influence Summit will bring together influential figures from the world of AI in various panels and workshops. There we will notably find the general director of Polytechnique Montréal, Maud Cohen, and Sasha Luccioni, responsible for AI and climate issues in the young Franco-American company Hugging Face, which is increasingly establishing itself at the heart of the development of ‘responsible, open-source AI. Billionaire Guy Laliberté will also be on hand to award two $15,000 grants to promising young technology companies.
For Zù, an incubator originally created to stimulate entrepreneurship in the creative industries, it is a way of confirming a technological shift taken in the last year at the initiative of Mr. Gourdin. “We always target start-ups in the creative industries, except that technology is very porous from one industry to another,” he says.
He adds that the role of incubators must also evolve, to instill good values in the young businesses they help to launch. “These are the future big companies of tomorrow,” after all.