[Music]
it’s entirely fitting that we’re talking
about changing the rules here
in caution don’t let the quaint
market-town appearance fool you this
community has been tearing up the
rulebook ever since Brunel blasted a
tunnel through Box Hill to make way for
his Great Western Railway in the 19th
century and I’ll come back to that later
many years ago I followed the rules I
was a conscientious civil servant doing
the bidding of Her Majesty’s Government
in the department of health and then I
took a risk a leap of faith and I left I
left to champion an inclusive digital
society to campaign for digital skills
for everyone and to encourage social and
economic change through technology and
in the process I’ve become what is known
as a woman in tech and we’re a minority
just 17% of the UK tech workforces
female and only 10% of Engineers of
women so this minority group is by its
very nature a rule-breaking one but we
women in tech have a shared
responsibility and that’s to make sure
that the tech workforce is as diverse as
a society around it and let’s think
about that for a moment so technology
isn’t just there for a proportion of the
population and tech products aren’t just
bought by men despite the fact we all
know they love their gadgets so it’s not
just a point of equality but it’s one of
fundamental economic sense that the
creativity and ideas that produce goods
and services for the whole population
are produced by teams that represent the
whole population and for the good of our
economy as
to better represent our consumer base we
need girls to see tech as a career for
them and not to shy away from science
technology engineering and math subjects
in schools but we also need parents
teachers and youth mentors to start
seeing careers in tech as being as much
about creativity design entrepreneurship
and communications as they are about
coding or about studying computer
science and I’m a case in point I may be
a woman in tech but I’m not a techie
I studied humanities not sciences so
technology is changing our world and
many would say it now rules our world
today were dependent on it in a way that
we’ve never been before and a whole
world of knowledge the Internet is
available to anyone at the touch of a
button it’s the most egalitarian and
open opportunity that’s ever been
invented today whole continents can
leapfrog over the decades of development
that we went through by using mobile and
other technologies to bring health
education and even light into homes
which had none before we can benefit
from the most extraordinary advances in
health research that seemed impossible
just a generation ago we can see and
chat with our friends and families
across the world from the comfort of our
own home and we can switch them off when
we’ve had enough we can order almost
anything from anywhere at any time and
soon it’ll be routine for our shopping
to be delivered by drones or by
self-driving vans but let’s also think
about what happens when we do these
things so when you use the search engine
can you really distinguish between
genuine search results and paid adverts
because many people can’t do you know
why those pop-up ads that you get on
your devices always seem to know exactly
what’s missing from your life and do you
like that or does it freak you out
if you shop online do you
check that the site is genuine before
you enter your personal or financial
information and do you use the same
password for everything just because
it’s easier to remember so everything
now from telephony to television how we
study how we shop how we bank how we
heat our homes plan our journeys all of
these are now digitized and fueled by an
explosion in big data and technology
doesn’t just connect us to people and
services when we want them our devices
themselves are connected to each other
they communicate amongst themselves and
they share data about us and what we’re
doing whether we like it or not the
Internet of Things and that’s the means
by which our devices talk to each other
is transforming our domestic lives but
as well as the huge convenience it also
makes us more vulnerable and have
greater consequences than many realize
so things are moving at such pace in the
tech world that the people that we
traditionally look to to make informed
decisions about what’s right and wrong
are themselves struggling to keep up so
parents are unaware of their children’s
life online and how to help them manage
it bosses struggle to predict the new
skills that their staff need to meet
changing consumer habits and growing
automation policymakers often can’t see
the wood for the trees when trying to
regulate or legislate in the shifting
world so what is increasingly lacking as
technology develops is the awareness and
the understanding of the implications of
the online world that we inhabit and
with it the ability and the support to
continually update our skills and
knowledge to keep up a few years ago we
might have thought that at least running
a B&B will be in a taxi driver was safe
from digital disruption but I know
companies like Airbnb and uber have
radically changed the rules without even
having a bed or a taxi and a report by
Dell technologies last summer estimated
that 85% of the jobs that will exist in
2030 it’s only 12 years away
haven’t yet been invented and whether or
not that’s accurate and we all know how
incredibly difficult it is to predict
the future the fact remains that the
world of work is changing and changing
fast
we’ve all heard technology described as
disruptive it disrupts the status quo
and it forces innovation and new
thinking it changes the rules digital
disruption is unstoppable and to try and
fight it is pointless and actually why
would we want to because it reflects
consumer demand and our ever constant
quest for easier faster and better
robotics biometrics blockchain big data
these are all part of our world and none
of us can afford to ignore it but this
isn’t just disrupting services and
traditional industries it’s also
beginning to disrupt the way we ordinary
people view the world how many of you
here in this room use some form of
social media hands up
most of you if not all of you and that’s
interesting because by using social
media we’re saying that we’re much more
comfortable with living our lives in
public we don’t seem to value privacy in
the way we have before but how many of
us are truly aware that the very way
that social media works means that our
individual world views and prejudices a
constantly reinforced rather than
challenged because the way the
information is served online is designed
to do exactly that so we may not mind
that Facebook choses cat videos or that
Twitter tells us who to follow but when
that type of personalization starts to
affect our understanding of the world
more broadly creating so-called filter
bubbles where we only see or hear views
similar to our own or when it’s
manipulated in a much more sinister way
to micro-target vulnerable groups or
when it leads to violent extremism
trusts then who and what we can trust
online is called into question
unintended consequences is afraid that I
use a lot these days
it’s the flipside of the technology
revolution it’s the advent of fate news
of filter bubbles of algorithms that
produce results that reflect racist
sexist or other bias even though we
assume that the underlying data is
totally neutral and this is where a
non-diverse workforce has serious
consequences so remember that only 17%
of those working in tech are women
so if we extrapolate from that albeit
very simplistically we could say that
that means that 83% of the algorithms
that influence some of the fairly
fundamental decisions that we’re making
about our lives a program by men so how
does that suit the 50% of the population
that are women
professor Dame Wendy Hall eminent
professor of computer science an expert
in artificial intelligence recently said
we cannot allow our world to be
organized by algorithms whose creators
are dominated by one gender ethnicity
age or culture and if we don’t challenge
this lack of diversity in tech we risk
ending up living in a world that
resembles a teenage boys smelly bedroom
those are her words not mine
and of course it’s not just about gender
you may have heard in the summer about
the new form of automatic hand dryer
that only worked when a light-skinned
hand was placed under it and not a
dark-skinned one because all the testers
had been white that’s not OK
so however advanced we think we are
we’re still in the foothills of
artificial intelligence and machine
learning we’re nowhere near the summit
and yet AI machine learning are already
dominating the products and services
that we use every day with all of the
human error and bias that we’re
unwittingly programming into them and we
need to acknowledge this reality
we’re changing the rules right here in
caution it may be just a small town in
the West of England but thanks to
pronunce vision and his refusal to
follow the rules it’s a town with a rich
heritage of innovation what’s perhaps
less well-known is that it sits at the
intersection of an extraordinary
combination of communications defense
intelligence fibre and data
infrastructures so where better to start
building a connected society to inspire
other communities and that’s what we
hope to do through calls from
Institute’s communities program using
the town as the testbed for much of our
work we’ll be working with the community
to identify trends approaches and
solutions for our digital future and we
want as many of you the residents of
caution as possible to get involved
we’re starting with a safer internet
project to coincide with Safer Internet
day it involves all the 10 local schools
as well as businesses local government
the police and youth and community
groups we’re also launching a pilot
project to look at data protection from
a citizens perspective you may have
heard of GDP are the general data
protection regulation that comes into
force in May or you may not but whether
you have or not it’s as implications for
every single one of us and we all need
to understand what it means for us so
these two projects will demonstrate the
power of changing the rules starting
with one specific local community your
community and turning ideas into
practical action and this isn’t just for
the benefit of caution what we learn
here will be used to influence the
digital future we all want to see
nationally ultimately it all comes down
to skills and learning we want everyone
to have the skills they need to harness
the enormous opportunities that digital
brings while protecting themselves from
the unanticipated homes this is lifelong
learning
this is adapting to a constantly
changing world that requires us to
interact with technology in increasingly
new ways whether we like it or not and
these skills aren’t just specialists
tech skills for geeks or for boffins
these are life skills for all of us like
problem-solving critical thinking and
creativity and they’re also learned
behaviors like resilience respect
empathy and Trust we need our kids to
grow up with inquiring minds that
question what they see to use judgment
tell fact from fiction we need teachers
to have the skills to teach not just how
to use digital tools but how to live in
a changing digital world without getting
lost in it we need parents to understand
and trust their own use of technology
not to turn away from it if they’re
going to help their kids to succeed we
need organizations to train their
workforce in the new skills needed in an
increasingly automated economy and to
identify new business models that are
truly fit for a digital age we need
social Civic and political institutions
to be far more fleet of foot to
anticipate the changes to develop
future-proofed not backward-looking
policies that will help everyone thrive
in a connected society and we need our
leaders to understand and defend our
digital vulnerability just as they’ve
always defended our geographical
vulnerability because it won’t be
traditional weapons that pose the
greatest threat to us but a cyber attack
on our vital infrastructure so we need
everyone kids adults consumers customers
citizens whatever we want to call
ourselves to feel empowered and not
overpowered by their digital future we
cannot afford to be passive or to
sleepwalk into the future we all need to
have confidence in our shared society
and to consciously create the digital
world that we want or we will get a
world we don’t want and we need to
change the rules to do so
we need above all to regain trust trust
in institutions and organizations in
experts and in tech itself and to
increase our ability to adapt a constant
change if we’re to make the most of what
is a technology dominated world and that
way we really can create a fair
inclusive connected society and rewrite
the rule book with our eyes wide open
[Applause]
you
it’s entirely fitting that we’re talking
about changing the rules here
in caution don’t let the quaint
market-town appearance fool you this
community has been tearing up the
rulebook ever since Brunel blasted a
tunnel through Box Hill to make way for
his Great Western Railway in the 19th
century and I’ll come back to that later
many years ago I followed the rules I
was a conscientious civil servant doing
the bidding of Her Majesty’s Government
in the department of health and then I
took a risk a leap of faith and I left I
left to champion an inclusive digital
society to campaign for digital skills
for everyone and to encourage social and
economic change through technology and
in the process I’ve become what is known
as a woman in tech and we’re a minority
just 17% of the UK tech workforces
female and only 10% of Engineers of
women so this minority group is by its
very nature a rule-breaking one but we
women in tech have a shared
responsibility and that’s to make sure
that the tech workforce is as diverse as
a society around it and let’s think
about that for a moment so technology
isn’t just there for a proportion of the
population and tech products aren’t just
bought by men despite the fact we all
know they love their gadgets so it’s not
just a point of equality but it’s one of
fundamental economic sense that the
creativity and ideas that produce goods
and services for the whole population
are produced by teams that represent the
whole population and for the good of our
economy as
to better represent our consumer base we
need girls to see tech as a career for
them and not to shy away from science
technology engineering and math subjects
in schools but we also need parents
teachers and youth mentors to start
seeing careers in tech as being as much
about creativity design entrepreneurship
and communications as they are about
coding or about studying computer
science and I’m a case in point I may be
a woman in tech but I’m not a techie
I studied humanities not sciences so
technology is changing our world and
many would say it now rules our world
today were dependent on it in a way that
we’ve never been before and a whole
world of knowledge the Internet is
available to anyone at the touch of a
button it’s the most egalitarian and
open opportunity that’s ever been
invented today whole continents can
leapfrog over the decades of development
that we went through by using mobile and
other technologies to bring health
education and even light into homes
which had none before we can benefit
from the most extraordinary advances in
health research that seemed impossible
just a generation ago we can see and
chat with our friends and families
across the world from the comfort of our
own home and we can switch them off when
we’ve had enough we can order almost
anything from anywhere at any time and
soon it’ll be routine for our shopping
to be delivered by drones or by
self-driving vans but let’s also think
about what happens when we do these
things so when you use the search engine
can you really distinguish between
genuine search results and paid adverts
because many people can’t do you know
why those pop-up ads that you get on
your devices always seem to know exactly
what’s missing from your life and do you
like that or does it freak you out
if you shop online do you
check that the site is genuine before
you enter your personal or financial
information and do you use the same
password for everything just because
it’s easier to remember so everything
now from telephony to television how we
study how we shop how we bank how we
heat our homes plan our journeys all of
these are now digitized and fueled by an
explosion in big data and technology
doesn’t just connect us to people and
services when we want them our devices
themselves are connected to each other
they communicate amongst themselves and
they share data about us and what we’re
doing whether we like it or not the
Internet of Things and that’s the means
by which our devices talk to each other
is transforming our domestic lives but
as well as the huge convenience it also
makes us more vulnerable and have
greater consequences than many realize
so things are moving at such pace in the
tech world that the people that we
traditionally look to to make informed
decisions about what’s right and wrong
are themselves struggling to keep up so
parents are unaware of their children’s
life online and how to help them manage
it bosses struggle to predict the new
skills that their staff need to meet
changing consumer habits and growing
automation policymakers often can’t see
the wood for the trees when trying to
regulate or legislate in the shifting
world so what is increasingly lacking as
technology develops is the awareness and
the understanding of the implications of
the online world that we inhabit and
with it the ability and the support to
continually update our skills and
knowledge to keep up a few years ago we
might have thought that at least running
a B&B will be in a taxi driver was safe
from digital disruption but I know
companies like Airbnb and uber have
radically changed the rules without even
having a bed or a taxi and a report by
Dell technologies last summer estimated
that 85% of the jobs that will exist in
2030 it’s only 12 years away
haven’t yet been invented and whether or
not that’s accurate and we all know how
incredibly difficult it is to predict
the future the fact remains that the
world of work is changing and changing
fast
we’ve all heard technology described as
disruptive it disrupts the status quo
and it forces innovation and new
thinking it changes the rules digital
disruption is unstoppable and to try and
fight it is pointless and actually why
would we want to because it reflects
consumer demand and our ever constant
quest for easier faster and better
robotics biometrics blockchain big data
these are all part of our world and none
of us can afford to ignore it but this
isn’t just disrupting services and
traditional industries it’s also
beginning to disrupt the way we ordinary
people view the world how many of you
here in this room use some form of
social media hands up
most of you if not all of you and that’s
interesting because by using social
media we’re saying that we’re much more
comfortable with living our lives in
public we don’t seem to value privacy in
the way we have before but how many of
us are truly aware that the very way
that social media works means that our
individual world views and prejudices a
constantly reinforced rather than
challenged because the way the
information is served online is designed
to do exactly that so we may not mind
that Facebook choses cat videos or that
Twitter tells us who to follow but when
that type of personalization starts to
affect our understanding of the world
more broadly creating so-called filter
bubbles where we only see or hear views
similar to our own or when it’s
manipulated in a much more sinister way
to micro-target vulnerable groups or
when it leads to violent extremism
trusts then who and what we can trust
online is called into question
unintended consequences is afraid that I
use a lot these days
it’s the flipside of the technology
revolution it’s the advent of fate news
of filter bubbles of algorithms that
produce results that reflect racist
sexist or other bias even though we
assume that the underlying data is
totally neutral and this is where a
non-diverse workforce has serious
consequences so remember that only 17%
of those working in tech are women
so if we extrapolate from that albeit
very simplistically we could say that
that means that 83% of the algorithms
that influence some of the fairly
fundamental decisions that we’re making
about our lives a program by men so how
does that suit the 50% of the population
that are women
professor Dame Wendy Hall eminent
professor of computer science an expert
in artificial intelligence recently said
we cannot allow our world to be
organized by algorithms whose creators
are dominated by one gender ethnicity
age or culture and if we don’t challenge
this lack of diversity in tech we risk
ending up living in a world that
resembles a teenage boys smelly bedroom
those are her words not mine
and of course it’s not just about gender
you may have heard in the summer about
the new form of automatic hand dryer
that only worked when a light-skinned
hand was placed under it and not a
dark-skinned one because all the testers
had been white that’s not OK
so however advanced we think we are
we’re still in the foothills of
artificial intelligence and machine
learning we’re nowhere near the summit
and yet AI machine learning are already
dominating the products and services
that we use every day with all of the
human error and bias that we’re
unwittingly programming into them and we
need to acknowledge this reality
we’re changing the rules right here in
caution it may be just a small town in
the West of England but thanks to
pronunce vision and his refusal to
follow the rules it’s a town with a rich
heritage of innovation what’s perhaps
less well-known is that it sits at the
intersection of an extraordinary
combination of communications defense
intelligence fibre and data
infrastructures so where better to start
building a connected society to inspire
other communities and that’s what we
hope to do through calls from
Institute’s communities program using
the town as the testbed for much of our
work we’ll be working with the community
to identify trends approaches and
solutions for our digital future and we
want as many of you the residents of
caution as possible to get involved
we’re starting with a safer internet
project to coincide with Safer Internet
day it involves all the 10 local schools
as well as businesses local government
the police and youth and community
groups we’re also launching a pilot
project to look at data protection from
a citizens perspective you may have
heard of GDP are the general data
protection regulation that comes into
force in May or you may not but whether
you have or not it’s as implications for
every single one of us and we all need
to understand what it means for us so
these two projects will demonstrate the
power of changing the rules starting
with one specific local community your
community and turning ideas into
practical action and this isn’t just for
the benefit of caution what we learn
here will be used to influence the
digital future we all want to see
nationally ultimately it all comes down
to skills and learning we want everyone
to have the skills they need to harness
the enormous opportunities that digital
brings while protecting themselves from
the unanticipated homes this is lifelong
learning
this is adapting to a constantly
changing world that requires us to
interact with technology in increasingly
new ways whether we like it or not and
these skills aren’t just specialists
tech skills for geeks or for boffins
these are life skills for all of us like
problem-solving critical thinking and
creativity and they’re also learned
behaviors like resilience respect
empathy and Trust we need our kids to
grow up with inquiring minds that
question what they see to use judgment
tell fact from fiction we need teachers
to have the skills to teach not just how
to use digital tools but how to live in
a changing digital world without getting
lost in it we need parents to understand
and trust their own use of technology
not to turn away from it if they’re
going to help their kids to succeed we
need organizations to train their
workforce in the new skills needed in an
increasingly automated economy and to
identify new business models that are
truly fit for a digital age we need
social Civic and political institutions
to be far more fleet of foot to
anticipate the changes to develop
future-proofed not backward-looking
policies that will help everyone thrive
in a connected society and we need our
leaders to understand and defend our
digital vulnerability just as they’ve
always defended our geographical
vulnerability because it won’t be
traditional weapons that pose the
greatest threat to us but a cyber attack
on our vital infrastructure so we need
everyone kids adults consumers customers
citizens whatever we want to call
ourselves to feel empowered and not
overpowered by their digital future we
cannot afford to be passive or to
sleepwalk into the future we all need to
have confidence in our shared society
and to consciously create the digital
world that we want or we will get a
world we don’t want and we need to
change the rules to do so
we need above all to regain trust trust
in institutions and organizations in
experts and in tech itself and to
increase our ability to adapt a constant
change if we’re to make the most of what
is a technology dominated world and that
way we really can create a fair
inclusive connected society and rewrite
the rule book with our eyes wide open
[Applause]
you
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