EmTech Europe 2021
Forging A Brighter Future: my time at EmTech Europe 2021
Last week I went along with a few of my colleagues to EmTech Europe which is being hosted in Belfast for the next three years - this one virtually of course.
Created and hosted by MIT Technology Review, EmTech’s own summary of the event is:
Taking Forging a Brighter Future as its theme, EmTech Europe unites leaders in academia, business and government to share ground breaking research-to-market advances and explore the latest breakthroughs in transformative technologies. Europe’s most brilliant minds will converge to discuss cutting-edge, solutions-focused technology across three episodes — An Intelligent Future, A Healthy Future and A Sustainable Future. Major questions around ethics and equity will feature across the two days of conference.
Across those three episodes we heard talks from some leading lights with really interesting stories to tell as well as some grave warnings about the type of future we could slip into without thought.
There was a huge range of domains represented in the speakers, including our very own CTO and Director of Innovation Tom Gray (who was the Lead Curator for the event) and Rachael Bland, our Head of Data Analytics.
You can watch Tom's opening remarks and Rachel's talk on Decarbonising Data on our YouTube channel - I've also summarised a few of the most interesting takeaways to consider from the event in this blog.
Humility and teachability
This was the biggest stand out for me and while it wasn’t an actual topic by itself, it was repeated over and over by people in their sessions. From the pioneers at BioNTech working on the covid vaccine, to an Olympian building green sea transport to bleeding edge AI cyber attack and defence, they all spoke about innovation needing to come from people and teams who have an open mindset and are humble enough to accept they don’t know everything and aren’t already right. This attitude allows them to more easily change their approach and attitudes based on new information.
I thought it was interesting that across a wide range of cutting edge technological and academical domains, this theme was ever present as opposed to the idea of the solitary genius working alone. We can do so much more as teams and communities, especially diverse ones, but it does rely on us being open, approachable and flexible with our thinking and approach.
Innovation isn’t the work of a moment
Kind of stating the obvious, however a useful reminder that innovation isn’t just a switch we flick, and a lightbulb moment happens from nowhere. The work done on the COVID-19 vaccine was heavily enabled by years, and sometimes lifetimes, of prior work and research to develop new ideas or link together previous dead ends into new possibilities. We clearly can’t decide 'I’d like £X worth of innovation this year' - however, we do need to perhaps be more mindful to cultivate the continual curiosity that means the conditions to create the lightbulb moment are cultivated.
It's easy for us to get tunnel vision on our current front and centre issue such that we lose sight of keeping that mindset and tinkering happening so we can spot and take advantage of paradigms, technologies, methodologies that suddenly fit together to fix a real need. For organisations, the warning here is that you won’t be able to compete with others who do continually enable this being mindful that culture is what you do, not what you say.
Regulation of AI is an enormous unknown
While the technology behind AI is fascinating, there is also a lot of really interesting thinking and work in how it would/could be regulated and how we can safely integrate this into our lives. There’s no doubt that it’s bringing sea changes at work, at home and in the social interactions that we have and with the best will in the world, it’s likely we’ll be unprepared for that.
I found Joanna Bryson’s session really intriguing as she spoke about regulation and the need for people to realise that we regulate the human behaviour around AI rather than targeting the algorithms. I think this resonates quite well with a lot of the issues we see with AI and how sometimes when an issue arises it gets waved away as the algorithms fault rather than the programming, data and biases projected by those who created it. There are no tech problems, just people problems, right?
AI and Cyber Crime is a frightening combination
I could have listened to this panel all day! Moderated by Tate Ryan-Mosely of MIT Tech Review and featuring Maire O’Neill from Queen’s University and Nicole Eagan from Darktrace, they discussed the combination of AI and Cyber and the various ways this impacts attack and defence. It perhaps only serves to highlight that within existing approaches, security really doesn’t scale down enough yet to be cost effective for smaller business or ‘mom and pop’ shops.
While we can still reinforce the good practices or user behaviour and system design / monitoring, when AI gets involved at the social engineering side things get messy. It’s clear at the minute that we are caught between not doing enough cyber safety education and equally not providing enough protections so that for most people they don’t need to worry. I’m sure most people working in tech have a hard time getting friends and family to adopt sensible online security practices before we introduce all the possibilities that malicious AI can bring. It’s fascinating and frightening in equal measure!
All in all I thought EmTech Europe 2021 was a fantastic event - well-curated and with some really excellent speakers. I'm delighted that it's being held in Belfast next year as I'm looking forward to attending in person and would highly recommend that you do the same when it runs in a city near you. In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for tickets for 2022 - I'll see you there!