We’ve been
thinking…a lot
Building ethical AI: a step-by-step guide for developers
The ethical responsibility of those designing and deploying artificial intelligence (AI) has never been more important. While high-level ethical principles are useful, developers often face a critical question: what does building ethical AI actually look like in...
From frontier labs to public life: how AI shaped the world in 2024
The publication of the Stanford University Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence The AI Index Annual Report 2024 offers the most comprehensive overview yet of artificial intelligence’s sweeping impact, mapping a year that cemented AI’s place in science, policy,...
Applying AI to strategic warning
Strategic warning - the early detection of conflict, instability, or adversarial intent - is a pillar of national security. But today’s intelligence analysts are working with outdated infrastructure, brittle data ecosystems, and escalating cognitive load. The result?...
Exposing the gender gap in AI
Generative AI (Gen AI) promises to transform economies, workforces, and innovation ecosystems. But this transformation is unfolding along a sharply uneven playing field - especially when it comes to gender. A new World Economic Forum report makes the argument clear:...
The state of AI safety
As frontier AI systems advance toward superhuman capabilities, their developers increasingly acknowledge the potentially catastrophic consequences of failure. The three leading labs - OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind - are planning to mitigate these risks, but...
Is the future of AI Physical AI?
Artificial Intelligence has evolved rapidly over the past two decades, what began as systems trained to identify patterns in data has now extended into AI agents capable of reasoning, acting, and even generating content with human-like fluency. As we look to the...
Safety v competitiveness: the Paris AI Action Summit
The Paris AI Action Summit, opening today, is the latest in a series of international efforts to shape artificial intelligence (AI) governance. Co-hosted by France and India, the summit will bring together world leaders, technology executives, and researchers to...
Risks and challenges of increasingly agentic algorithmic systems
It has been over a year since the publication of the paper Harms from Increasingly Agentic Algorithmic Systems published in the FAccT Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. The paper has since then received significant...
‘Agentic’: the 2025 word of the year?
The last two years in artificial intelligence adoption have been all about generative AI, now, another technological wave - AI agents - promises to disrupt the tech landscape, potentially making ‘agentic’ the defining term of 2025. The rise of AI agents AI...
25 AI predictions for 2025
Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to transform industries and everyday life, and by 2025, its impact may be even greater. Here are 25 AI predictions offering a glimpse into how AI could shape our lives in 2025 and beyond. 1. AI-powered diagnostics feature...
Ten steps to align AI with your corporate values
Artificial intelligence (AI) presents enormous opportunities for innovation, efficiency, and growth, but it also brings complex ethical challenges. For the C-suite, aligning AI with corporate values is about more than merely adopting technology responsibly. It’s about...
The ethical challenges of generative AI
As organisations, both in the private and public sectors, explore the adoption of generative AI, ethical challenges present themselves. Far from academic; they impact real decisions around data security, privacy, bias, transparency, intellectual property, and even...
AI and the EU border: surveillance, security, and migrant rights
The rise of border AI: security vs. rights Borders have existed for millennia, but the advent of AI has transformed how states surveil and police marginalised communities at border zones. Over the past two decades, borders have become critical sites for...
What AI in elections teaches us about the ethical use of AI
It's a big day for democracy in the US and AI has been playing a part. The emergence of AI-driven 'voting assistants', has underscored a set of ethical challenges that hold lessons for commercial sectors adopting artificial intelligence. While these voting assistants...
Advanced AI agents – opportunities and governance imperatives
The rapid progression of artificial intelligence (AI) has introduced a new generation of "advanced AI agents," defined as systems leveraging large language models (LLMs) to execute complex, multistep tasks across diverse environments autonomously. Unlike basic...
Short-term gain and long-term loss: social AI and loneliness
Loneliness is something that many of us could experience within our lifetime; it is a natural reaction to solitary situations given our inherent traits as social creatures. There is no universal experience of loneliness, either; it is highly subjective and can be...
Ethical AI and the ethics owner: definitions and challenges
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes an increasingly powerful tool in both public and private sector organisations, executives are faced with a critical challenge: how to deploy AI responsibly while maintaining public trust and upholding ethical standards. Ethical...
Attention to intimacy: the evolution of AI-driven platforms
The "race to intimacy" represents a significant shift in the evolution of AI-driven platforms, moving beyond the initial race to capture user attention and toward fostering deep personal connections between users and artificial intelligence (AI). While this new phase...
AI in education: ensuring fairness in predictive analysis
Predictive analytics is becoming increasingly prevalent in the use of AI in education, especially in identifying struggling students who may need interventions to succeed. Machine learning models analyse large datasets to predict student outcomes, such as likelihood...
The ethical quandaries of AI in healthcare
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is permeating healthcare in multiple ways, from enhancing diagnostics to streamlining patient care and predicting outcomes. However, as AI technologies advance, they bring significant ethical concerns, particularly around privacy, bias,...
AI is changing HR, HR needs to change too
Human Resources Directors are attractive potential clients to companies selling workforce and AI and human resources solutions underpinned by large language models. First HR is always under cost pressure as a non-profit generating infrastructure. Second HR is often...
Large language models: challenges and opportunities
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionised natural language processing (NLP) with their ability to generate human-like text at an unprecedented scale. These models enable advancements in fields ranging from customer service to education and content generation....
Introducing The Global Digital Compact (GDC)
The Global Digital Compact (GDC), as outlined in the draft of July 11, 2024, represents a unified international effort to shape the future of the digital landscape and AI, with the ultimate goal of building an inclusive, open, fair, safe, and secure digital space for...
Disability-inclusive design in AI
AI has transformed how we interact with the world; from virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, to AI algorithms that curate our social media feeds, the influence of AI is undeniable. However, this transformation is not always equitable. Marginalised groups,...
AI for children: balancing innovation and ethics
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes an increasingly powerful tool in product development, its application in services and products designed for children and young people presents both opportunities and ethical challenges. Children are a unique demographic,...
The AI sustainability challenge
The environmental impact of AI’s core infrastructures—particularly data centres—has become a growing concern worldwide. Recent research highlights the significant carbon footprint of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing (NLP) and emphasises the...
Selecting the right generative AI vendors for your business
For senior executives, particularly those in large organisations, selecting the right generative AI vendors can be a pivotal decision. Whether in the private or public sector, adopting generative AI presents an opportunity to gain a substantial competitive edge by...
The case for robot friendships
In 2019, philosopher John Danaher presented a detailed defence of the possibility of humans forming genuine friendships with robots. This exploration of human-robot relationships (HRRs) and human-robot friendships (HRFs) addresses the rapid development of sociable...
What is ethical AI?
As the reach of artificial Intelligence grows, so do the ethical challenges that come with it. To harness AI responsibly, organisations must prioritise not just efficiency or profitability, but ethical AI principles that ensure fairness, transparency, and...
A role for investigative journalism in AI governance
The revelations of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in March 2018, when over 50 million Facebook profiles were harvested without consent, marked a pivotal moment in the public’s understanding of Big Tech’s data practices. The investigation by The New York Times and The...