The AI Book

CHAPTER 50AI and Business Ethics in Financial Markets

By Daniel Liebau¹ and Tiffany Wong¹

¹Founder, Lightbulb Capital

²Manager, PwC UK

Artificial intelligence (AI) is widely discussed in the media, and there are many views on how it will affect humanity’s future. Since the publication of the academic article entitled “Deep Learning” in 2015¹ there is a focus on the branch of AI with learning capability. Such algorithms are fed large amounts of training data to enable them to predict variables of interest. In this chapter, we will concentrate on such machine learning algorithms when we use the abbreviation “AI”. We acknowledge other branches of artificial intelligence, such as robotics, that aim at automating tasks and processes. In his recent book, AI Superpowers venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee highlights a game-changing insight: we have now moved from the age of AI discovery (focused on research) to one of AI implementation that is all about the application of the technology to real-world problems.² That is why, at the present time, the increased potential of AI has led to numerous conversations about its ethical implications. Industry experts have different views. “Humans have found it impossible to encode ethical standards in finance, so we generally get principles-based guidance like “do the right thing”. It will take AI a long time to learn the difference between right and wrong on matters where human experts often disagree,” says Matthew Cannon, managing partner of Singapore-based ...