Quality Alchemist (品質煉金術師): CityU Seminar on the challenges and responses of AI to Public Management

2019年9月12日星期四

CityU Seminar on the challenges and responses of AI to Public Management

The Department of Public Policy, CityU arranged a seminar named “The Challenges and Responses of Artificial Intelligence to the Public Management”. The USA, China and the EU have launched strategies and policies to complete for the development opportunities of AI. However, AI also brings a series of public management problems such as employment substitution, etc. This seminar focused on those topics, based on theoretical discussions, international comparisons, combined with cases to analyze and then put forward some new views and understanding. I took a photo with Prof. Richard M. Walker (Chair Professor, Acting Head of POL Dept., CityU).

I also took a photo with guest speaker Prof. Liang Zheng (Professor, School of Public Policy and Management; Deputy Director, China Institute for Science and Technology Policy (CISTP), Tsinghua University).

In the beginning, Prof. Liang Zheng briefed his talk content included i) The development of AI in China; ii) The challenge of AI for public management; iii) Key issues – Data Governance; iv) Key issues – Platform governance; and v) Opinions and recommendations.

Firstly, Prof. Liang mentioned the background of China’s AI strategies included “Made in China 2025” in 2015, “The 13^th five-year plan for national science and technology innovation” in 2016 and “Development plan for the new generation artificial intelligence” in 2017. Then he introduced China Institute for Science and Technology Policy (CISTP), Tsinghua University which had involved in the policy study and draft.

Then Prof. Liang compared China and the world on Science and Technology output such as research papers (China is leader on AI research papers with high impact), Patent (China > US > Japan). For international AI talent, China’s AI specialists reached 18,232 (8.9% of the global total), next only to the US (13.9%). However, China has a lower percentage of top talents. He also stated industry development in China had 1011 AI companies by June 2018 but still significantly behind the US which had 2028 companies. Nevertheless, China has the highest venture investment in AI.

And then Prof. Liang compared different countries AI strategies and policy priorities among USA, Japan, EU and China. China focused on industrialization of AI application and he raised Huawei AI solution (e.g. AI + Transportation) and Alibaba Industrial Brain (e.g. Cloud Computing).

After that Prof. Liang discussed the challenge of AI to public management. He mentioned the following challenges:

i) Shock employment

ii) Security issues (AI and “Artificial Stupidity”, Personal Safety; Privacy Security and Data Security)

iii) Fairness issues (Algorithmic discrimination; Information gap)

iv) Ethical dilemma (Legal status of AI) – United Nations: Everyone involved in the development, design, production, assembly and use of robots must share responsibility.

Prof. Liang discussed data governance on data quality, algorithm and governance rules. However, China’s data quality (such as openness, transparency and shareability) is still low, restricting the further AI development. Rules for data under “Savage Growth” would cause of social and economic risks.

And then Prof. Liang compared different social network platform data rules included Facebook, YouTube, WeChat and Sina Weibo. He stated multiple roles of government to governance data such as producer of data, user of data and the regulator of the data.

Prof. Liang said platform companies faced different conflicts including false information, data ownership, privacy protection, security, fairness, etc.

Finally, he described the comparison table of platform governance models in terms of subjects, methods and limitation under three situation and they were platform, government and third party organization.

Some examples on public-private partnership were introduced in terms of Public safety, IP, Certification system, Public service and Public school.

At the end, Prof. Liang shared his opinions and recommendation in for dimensions and they were Social foresight, Synchronous design, Adaptive Governance and Global participation.