Hastings Hunts for AI Specialists (1)

The office dictionary - if we still had a hard copy - might say something like ‘intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills’. Wikipedia thinks we are talking about ‘logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, planning, creativity, and problem solving’. These are some of the things that enable us to largely dominate other life. However, even these are proving inadequate for handling the big data streaming in.

The Telegraph reports Hastings Insurance plans to ‘hire a few hundred data analytics people in the next few years’. This will include artificial intelligence (AI) specialists. UK insurance generally is increasingly looking to computers to detect risk taking, and uncover fraudulent claims. EDP24 earlier advised Aviva is in the market for solutions that ‘make its systems talk to each other’. [caption id="attachment_23235" align="alignright" width="340"] Big Data Icebergs Fotolia 120902097[/caption]

Are we moving towards delegating high-level decisions to machines? We are getting used to cars driving us around while we chill, but at least we are there and we can monitor what is going on. However, if we cannot analyse big data properly ourselves, how on earth will we manage the morality of super computers?

Auger is confident the UK insurance industry will handle AI ethics competently. However, we believe we should all be mindful of the boundaries. On August 12, 2017, Elon Musk advised AOL that artificial intelligence presents ‘vastly more risk than North Korea’.

Last year he cautioned that, ‘if artificial intelligence is left unregulated, humans could devolve into the equivalent of house cats next to increasingly powerful supercomputers’. In the 1950’s, mathematicians were already pondering how closely machine decisions could resemble human thinking, and developed the Turing Test to measure this.

[caption id="attachment_23239" align="alignleft" width="340"] Artificial Intelligence Ethics Fotolia 106264588[/caption]

Forbes posted a great article asking whether AI could replace humans in the customer service industry. The contributor, Valley Voices thinks while artificial intelligence addresses ‘high-urgency situations quickly’, it can never replicate human empathy because we do not know how to program it. This should never become a cop-out. A few decades ago, we were still learning the basic building blocks of computer programming.

We are firmly in the camp at Auger that AI needs to complement, not replace customer service. We are investigating ways to streamline our service to clients. We have been tackling the issue of identifying customer sentiment, and are quantifying the tone of their comments to establish any dissatisfaction.

Should any of these scores fall below threshold our system will automatically transfer the occurrence to one of our fantastic customer service agents. In the next phase, we plan to interpret emojis to identify the users' emotions, before we decide how best to handle sarcasm!

All good fun: But it has the serious aim of making the claims process the best experience for all our customers. We will do whatever it takes ... to ensure we do the right thing with artificial intelligence. Our clients hold us in their trust. We want to sure we deserve this confidence every time.