Embracing the future under AI

New Anglo-Celt columnist Patricia McAlernon will be pushing for ethical considerations to be central in shaping the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) when she attends a global conference at the end of this month.

Since some people are probably enduring sleepless nights due to their jobs becoming obsolete with advances in AI, Insomnia coffee shop seems an appropriate location for the Celt to meet Patricia McAlernon for our interview.

While AI has only forced its way in to the public consciousness in recent years, Patricia has long been ahead of the game. The Ballyhaise based woman recalls the reaction of people in the early 2000s when she discussed her background in AI.

“At that time nobody really knew what artificial intelligence was,” she says. “People used to think I was talking about artificial insemination - that it was an agricultural application,” she says only half joking.

The County Armagh native’s studies in university set her on this AI trajectory. After taking her Masters in Analytical Chemistry at Birkbeck College - part of the University of London - in 1993, Patricia was persuaded to stay on to undertake a PhD in electro-chemistry - measuring the movement of ions.

“He was well before his time,” she lauds of her supervisor Prof Jonathan Slater. “He said let’s work on how to analyse responses from an array of gas sensors. He said we’d look at using artificial neural networks (ANN) - in those days it was known as ANN - but now people are calling it artificial intelligence.

“So I helped build what was called as an artificial nose,” she said of the device which could monitor gases in the environment.

The ‘nose’ ultimately found an application in hospital wards where it could detect the presence of helicobacter pylori infections from analysing patients’ breaths.

However given how under explored AI was in those days, jobs in the field were scarce. Dr McAlernon began her own business selling German medical equipment to major pharmaceutical companies in England.

In 2006 she moved from London to Kilnaleck and in 2008 she set up her own business, Bio Images.

“That was selling microscope equipment to big pharma all over Ireland,” she explains. She now runs Drumlins Energy which provides - amongst other things - AI solutions for companies, including in agriculture.

Patricia’s interest in the ethical side makes perfect sense in light of her voluntary commitments outside work. She is a member of a Christian group called Grand Priory Ireland, which is a branch of the rather lofty sounding ‘Ordo Supremus Militaris Templi Hierosolymitani’ (OSMTH). Patricia shows the Celt a photograph of the group, the members all dressed in full length white gowns emblazoned with St George’s cross.

“It’s a global organisation that helps to fund charity works. One of the projects that the group is involved in is to rebuild a church in the Holy Land that has been destroyed,” Patricia explains assuring they are not a secret organisation and are “very much out in the open”.

OSMTH runs a UN endorsed project called ‘Woman for Women’, which aims to help empower women enduring oppression or abuse. Patricia is the Irish rep for ‘Woman for Women’ and has obtained permission to enter prisons to try to help inmates. Patricia being Patricia, she will of course bring an AI focus to the project.

“I’m going to introduce a package called AI Companion, and this is a software platform that will help their mental health. For this device you can speak into it: ‘I’m not feeling great today. I really feel I can’t go on thinking about the length of my sentence,’” she explains noting the software will learn responses to help motivate the prisoner, and to suggest activities to lift their spirits.

“You can train this model to say, ‘Look you only have a month to go. Let’s go to the library in prison to read more’. This is to be trialled, it’s a new product,” she adds.

She notes too that virtual reality - which is dependent on AI - can help train inmates new job skills they can put to use upon release.

“They can’t be physically out learning how to climb a wind turbine, but they can use VR goggles [to gain some experience], and that’s all related to AI,” says Patricia.

As a little experiment, we have both opened Zoom during our interview. The AI companion then takes our conversation and instantly compiles a pretty accurate report. This was no addition to a journalist penning a 1000-plus word interview, but it would be handy for club secretaries drafting minutes.

While you can have little wins with AI, Patricia says the downsides of this emerging technology are often flagged to her. People frequently tell Patricia about how they were speaking to a friend about an issue and all of a sudden they receive prompts on their phone for adverts related to it.

“They are feeling as if Big Brother is watching them and they can’t even have a private conversation about anything. But you can turn that AI monitoring off,” she says pointing out privacy can be achieved with a few clicks in your phone settings.

Patricia agrees the dawn of AI poses greater concerns than simply being tortured by advertisers.

“People are afraid that AI will mean that their jobs are going to be eradicated, but that’s not true. Some jobs will because AI will be good to combine with robots to remove mundane jobs on production lines. So where do people on quality control get their jobs?

“People are genuinely concerned about that.”

Patricia predicts that for many roles, AI won’t replace employees, but will carry the burden of the more repetitive aspects of their work.

“You can use AI to allow you more time to be more creative,” she assures. “Even in the church, ministers are using AI to write their sermons,” she says noting that AI can do the leg work of collating relevant passages.

More excitingly is advances in the medical field. She gives the example of doctors assessing breast scans for possible cancers. “The doctor could be very tired and miss something.”

However those same images can be uploaded for check by AI software which could provide a “more thorough” assessment.

She enthuses it will also enable “drug discovery” research to be undertaken more efficiently.

“It was all very time consuming and cumbersome.”

“Now AI can develop a drug so much quicker because you don’t need someone to monitor with a microscope because all of the images are going straight through [to the AI software].”

Also she notes that medicines will be custom made for the patient.

“With AI in the future there will be personalised medicine - you will have one specific level of drug components in your medicine which is specific to you, which means it’s more effective.”

With decades of experience in AI, and with her heart in the right place, Patricia has joined the National Standards Authority Ireland (NSAI) as an expert. She will attend a major AI conference in India in the coming weeks where the NSAI and their equivalents from other nations will be joined by the world’s top experts to discuss the shaping of regulations governing this emerging sector.

“I go to all the European and global meetings to represent Ireland in defining and setting up standards for the use of AI in all sectors,” says Patricia.

“My interest is in using AI ethically to protect society,” she says adding this will only become more important with the passing of time.

“In the next few years, the IQ of an AI software platform will reach over 300. Einstein had an IQ level of 150.

“AI has been developed so well, and the computer power is so well advanced you are going to have AI systems that have IQs beyond the capability of a human.”

Upon her return from India Patricia will commence a new regular column in the Celt in which she will flag concerns, while highlighting the possible benefits.

“You are trying to reassure people that AI, if it’s in the right hands it can progress society, but if it gets in the wrong hands it can cause a lot of damage.”