Name: Mastercard Vice Chairman On Why Diversity Is Key In Artificial Intelligence
Uploaded: 2018-06-12
Duration: 5 min 28 s
Description: Ann Cairns, Vice Chairman of Mastercard Inc., questions whether we will “perpetuate an East-West divide by having different philosophical views as we teach the computers how to think.”

Your current role, part of it is about sort of evaluating the future of payments and the fintech space in general. I'm curious when you, from your position look out onto that landscape, sort of what you see. As on the horizon, what the hot things you're sort of keeping your eye on? Well, first of all I think in America particularly conversational commerce is taking off. People are talking to their devices and actually buying things using speech. It's less prevalent here in Europe Though about one in five people have already done that in Europe. Has anyone done that? Does anyone? Anybody talk to Alexa or to buy Siri or? Device. Device. Yeah, so that's starting to take off. So one of the things that we have to think about But is how do we make them really safe and secure without introducing a lot of friction into that. So, that's a nice design challenge to have. The other thing that's very hot is of course artificial intelligence. Right. And we're using that in all sorts of ways, but in our industry, fraud prevention is a big thing, so for example, the way that you use a telephone is different from the way that I use a telephone, the way that we actually key. And we have artificial intelligence that can detect your behavior, so if I left my phone there and you picked it up and tried to make a payment, It would know it's not me. So, that's kinda cool, that one of the things that I was just talking about recently was I was in China and was clear to me artificial intelligence is taking off there in a big way and obviously it is in Silicon Valley as well. And I wonder whether we're gonna perpetuate the east- west divide by having different philosophical views as we teach the computers how to think. It's kind of an interesting thing to think of. The other thing is people have asked me why is it important for more women to go into STEM and be involved in these industries. And I said, well, first of all, we're half the human race. And if there aren't enough of us engaged, and I don't actually even just mean women. I mean a diverse group of people teaching the computers how to think. Then we're gonna get computers who think like some broke culture on the West Coast, or some completely different philosophy in Asia, so that's not Great actually. Right, what do you think is the key to getting more women into this field? You've probably been involved in a lot of different initiatives. What have you seen that worked? Well I think you've got to grab girls young and tell them it's fun. [ LAUGH ] And so we've been rolling out our Girls for Tech program. We've already engaged 50, 000 girls round about 12 years old. Around the world and brought them into MasterCard and said. Hey, the tech industry's cool. Here's all the sort of fun things that we do. And it's actually quite a glamorous job as you move up the ranks. And now, we're rolling that out to about 200, 000 girls around the world. I do think it's just getting them at the right age, and maybe you should start even earlier then that. Right, so I mean all the technology you're talking about seems really useful for me and you, we have our mobile phones, we have our bank accounts. So how do you make sure this technology doesn't skip over those or doesn't leave out those who aren't yet at that So that advanced stage, in terms of their own personal technology. So I do say that there's no point having the Internet of everything if you don't have the Internet of everyone. So this whole area of inclusion is really important. But it's interesting you're talking about technology skipping because, you know, many people who are excluded from the financial system in Africa have got mobile phones. Mh- hm. And it may actually be a feature phone but that doesn't matter. They've got some way of communicating. And that's why we started our labs in Africa based in Kenya. Actually with African people building solutions for Africans, living on sort of a couple of dollars a day, and one of the things that we've thought about is you're never gonna persuade anybody who owns a couple of dollars a day to put that money in the telephone. So you've got to find a funding source But what we found is that around the world governments are helping mainly with things like farming subsidies and so on. And many women are farmers in different parts of the world. But if it's manually delivered, then all of the middle men in between are taking their cuts before arrives with the person who deserves the money. We're trying to work with governments that got the money direct from the government to the farmer, that's one example. Or direct from the government to the parent who's getting child benefit. Or to the person who's getting a pension And these kinds of things are starting to bring people into the financial system. And with the projects we've had around the world, we think we've added something like 300 million more people. We have a commitment to add half a billion by 2020.

Ann Cairns, Vice Chairman of Mastercard Inc., questions whether we will “perpetuate an East-West divide by having different philosophical views as we teach the computers how to think.”