As Coda Story readers are aware, such are the ethical concerns over the widening use of artificial intelligence that a number of campaigns have sprung up to limit or ban its use. In the United Kingdom, in the case of facial recognition, some privacy advocates have argued that an outright ban should be on the table. In the U.S., the House Education and Labor Committee will hold hearings on how AI is impacting workers and their jobs once Congress returns in September.

Some aspects of this debate could be heard during a panel discussion titled “Smarter Than Us: The Rise Of AI” in Old Street, London on Thursday evening. In an upstairs room in the heart of Silicon Roundabout, around 140 attendees - including programmers and public sector workers - ate pizza and listened to five speakers discuss how their companies are harnessing AI to improve sectors like digital identities, healthcare, journalism and even real estate. 

A number of the panelists spoke about how their businesses gather information like historical property sales data, images and case studies about Type 2 Diabetes, while trying to preserve some sense of privacy and anonymity. 

Samuel Rowe, Research and Policy Executive at Yoti, a company with a digital identity app, spoke about the lack of guidelines around facial recognition. “There are insufficient safeguards in place for a lot of facial recognition technologies,” he said. “However, from this interrogation, at least in my opinion, there comes an opportunity for radical transparency from organizations working in this field.”