AI: The journey to 99%
November 14, 2019
November 14, 2019
AI is on the move in Singapore. The government views it as critical for digital readiness and economic growth. Citizens are embracing it. In fact, 72 percent would use more government digital services if agencies used AI to provide more accurate and useful information, according to an Accenture Citizen Pulse Survey. Here, AI is not coming. It has arrived.
Yet just as the use of AI among government agencies in Singapore is gaining momentum, misconceptions that it can only ever be 95 percent accurate threaten to stop progress in its tracks. To break through this threshold—and journey to 99 percent accuracy—both the sceptics and the die-hards must ignore the hype and emphasise human and machine collaboration.
This dynamic between humans and machines—which is non-negotiable to reach 99 percent accuracy—is often overlooked. Instead, many government agencies take a technology approach to AI implementation, expecting to plug it in and watch the magic happen immediately. What is needed is a strategic, outcomes-focused approach that defines success milestones for a specific end goal. While the AI improves, human oversight is essential.
AI could create up to US$215 billion in gross value added (GVA) across 11 industries in Singapore by 2035.
To breach AI’s accuracy threshold, Singapore’s government agencies should develop an ecosystem to support and scale their AI algorithms. The focus should be on the following fundamentals.
The more that datasets are proxies for reality, the better they generate accurate outcomes that can transform how government works.
Building algorithms with open source frameworks creates opportunities for learning and improvement to reduce error rates and biased results.
AI accuracy improvements start with a human-machine feedback loop that assesses performance and feeds learnings back into algorithms.
If the AI is not intuitive and easy to use, or adds to their workload, people may not use it. And without humans to train the AI, 99 percent cannot happen.
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