Keynote: Human life beyond Analytics, Netherlands, 23 May 2017

Barry Devlin explores the ethical and economic impacts of analytics, artificial intelligence and algorithms on life as a human being in the next few years.

When big data first came to prominence, we thought it would improve and transform business through advanced analytics. And so it did, enabling completely new data-driven approaches to marketing, manufacturing, and more. What we missed was that it would also transform society, particularly through its enablement of an extensive and novel wave of artificial intelligence (AI). The question now is: how will human life look as big data, advanced analytics and AI, rather than software, “eat the world”?

From chat-bots to autonomous vehicles, from game playing to decision making, from fake news to deep learning, a combination of big data, algorithms and AI is transforming work, politics, media, and economics. In some areas, it’s just becoming visible, in other areas the outcomes seem clear. But unintended consequences lurk at every turn. In this keynote, Dr Barry Devlin explores the possible ethical, economic and social consequences of the current growth of a data-driven, algorithmic, AI-implemented world.