When it comes the list of top AI influencers across the world, Nigel Willson is a name that is always on top. Formerly a veteran at Microsoft and currently the founder of Awaken AI, Nigel's take on AI is unique and more holistic, as he believes and promotes a human-centric approach to the technology. Recently, Nigel Willson spoke about the challenges AI technologies possess if they were left unchecked at the NASSCOM XperienceAI virtual summit. 

As the world goes through another technological transition period, with spending in AI growing drastically during the COVID phase compared to the year before, he believes it is essential to understand where the technology came from and where it is heading to. According to Willson, global spending in AI is set to double in the next four years. He also warns that as technology has been growing exponentially and wonders if humans even have the capacity to catch up to it. 

"We humans think in a linear step by step approach, while technology is growing exponentially as we use new technologies to generate the next versions of these technologies," said Willson.

Similarly, Willson points out that, as more technology grows in terms of power, the cost of creating technologies is decreasing. He pointed out the transformation of computers from the gargantuan UNIVACs, that span around huge warehouses to the IBM Square computers, that's only a square millimetre in size, yet it is much more powerful than the UNIAVC's of the 50s. 

"The global coronavirus pandemic has further accelerated the adoption of technologies like AI. In the last two months, we have seen two years with digital transformation," he added. With AI set to add around 500 billion dollars to India's GDP by 2025, one has to be naive to believe everything that the future is a bright place.

The level of biases that have been demonstrated by many groundbreaking AI systems across the globe is shocking, especially in terms of race and gender, Willson noted; even though these biases are built into the system unintentionally. "AI reflect our biases back at us, but the challenge here is that this technology is creating an infinite version of that bias," said Willson.

He points out that one of the main reasons for unintentional bias creeping into the system is the result of lack of diversity in the field of AI research, a lot of these biases can be addressed earlier on by bundling diverse teams. 

According to Willson, apart from gender and racial biases, other biases such as confirmation bias, sample bias, and availability bias requires special attention. Notably, with so much of what's going on in the 'AI black box' unknown, ethical AI systems are the need of the hour to make those invisible things visible. 

"Ethical AI is about fairness, openness, and transparency. It is fabout making those invisible things visible when it comes to AI," he added. 

However, despite calling for ethical AI systems, he believes that organisations should adopt ethical and responsible AI systems because they want to incorporate them not because it is legislated to them. Since the latter approach may result in many organisations using rubber stamp ethical AI badges to meet the requirements of legislation as opposed to genuinely buying into the philosophy. 

Importantly, he also suggests that exponential growth in technologies such as synthetic DNA based storage solutions and quantum computing means, we cannot afford to wait 5-10 years for implementing responsible AI principles.