Agent of Change: Catriona Wallace
In addition to her roles as founder and CEO of fintech start-up Flamingo AI and as adjunct professor at the Australian Graduate School of Management, Dr Catriona Wallace is a campaigner for ethics in the artificial intelligence sector. She also helmed the second ever woman-led company to list on the ASX-listed company.
Many people have concerns about our growing reliance on artificial intelligence. How do you feel about it?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the fastest-growing technology sector in the world, likely to replace 40 per cent of jobs in the next five years, especially in industries such as tourism, media, telecommunications and banking. By the end of 2021, 80 per cent of all tech platforms will be powered by AI. There are two lenses through which you can look at AI. One is that it will automate a vast amount of tasks we humans do, workwise and in daily life. This will bring efficiency and better decision making, and free humans up to be more human. On the other side, there is very little legislation or regulation to give guidance. In the worst-case scenario, the next world war won’t be chemical, won’t be nuclear – it will be AI-driven. This really could go either way.
Why is artificial intelligence so problematic?
Data is one of the big reasons. The data that AI draws on is typically historical and is full of bias. Last year, when Apple released the Apple Card credit card, it used an algorithm to do automated credit provisioning. In a number of cases, husbands and wives put in the same financial information, and on average the husband received 10 times the credit limit of the wives – because the data indicated that men were a better credit risk than women. On top of that, nine out of 10 jobs in the AI machine learning field are held by men, typically younger men, and as coders they may have their own unconscious biases. In my talks, I often point out to the audience that I’m a professor but when I ask them to Google the phrase “professor style”, what comes up are images of young white men in tweed suits. There are lots of examples of biased AI. Google “unprofessional hairstyle” and 90 per cent of the images are women of colour. Data is tagged and labelled by humans; what we are actually doing is hard coding all the biases that have plagued us for years, programming them straight into the machines that are going to make the decisions and run the world. It’s not okay.
How do we build the future we want to see?
AI makes things bigger, faster and cheaper, and it will break things bigger, faster and cheaper. That’s why we need informed decision-making and legislation around it. Through my consultancy, Ethical AI Advisory, and my work on the board of Responsible Technology Australia, I am trying to build a movement around the idea of AI ethics. At the moment these ideas are quite advanced in Europe and also in Singapore, but the challenge is that your average citizen has a very low understanding of what AI is and how it will affect them. Australian Human Rights Commissioner Ed Santow is doing marvellous work on this, developing a human rights framework and principles around AI, but we need a citizens’ movement around AI, demanding better standards from government and private enterprise. In the US judicial system we have already seen how the algorithm judges use to determine the likelihood of recidivism skews towards higher sentences for African-Americans. Over here, our military, police and border control departments are well-equipped with AI decision-making and it’s probably just a matter of time before we see some pretty hideous results.
You have founded four companies. What have you learnt from being a serial entrepreneur?
You get 99 punches for one real win. If you can deal with that ratio, you’re likely to be successful. It’s when you are failing that you reach the agitation point, where you need to do something radically different to change your business. So failing is not all bad – it’s just a message that it’s time to do something differently. When you’re an entrepreneur, the only guarantee is that you will be given the opportunity to learn beyond your wildest dreams.
What novel, film or album do you turn to when you want to feel better?
I like anything mystical. I got into fantasy books as a child and I still like escaping into mythical, mystical worlds. One of my favourites is The Ill-Made Mute by Cecilia Dart-Thornton.
What is the one skill you are still trying to master?
Recently I’ve focused on how we manage ourselves so that we are the best leaders making the best decisions. I don’t think I have been particularly good at this – for the last five years I haven’t been doing anything but working and looking after my five children. In my time in the US, I met a lot of super-successful, super-impressive Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and almost all of them talked about the moment they started meditating or started yoga or taken up some other form of mindfulness. I used to think, “It’s all right for you, you’re super-rich you can find the time.’ A year and a half ago I’d reached the lowest of the lows: our share price was terrible, our investors were really angry, our clients were really difficult. I turned to meditation and mindfulness training and it has been fantastic. I do it every day. It helps me settle, be calmer and separate logic and thinking from emotion. It’s been life-changing and I don’t think I would have survived without it.
Which memory do you return to again and again?
I have a really distinct memory of walking down the street when I was about eight years old. I suddenly stopped and went, “I’m going to invent something that no one’s ever done before.” I have no idea where that feeling came from, I just remember how profoundly it hit me at that moment. I have lived out the dream of that little girl standing by the side of the road: I patented a machine-learning technology and did a PhD that was the first of its type in the world. Now my life goal is finding a way to use the experience I have in this incredibly important field for a greater social purpose.
Interview_ Ute Junker
Image_ Nicolas LaFargue/UnSplash