Responsible use of AI is not a priority in countries that increasingly use AI for governance

Welcome to another episode of the AI Business podcast, in which we are not going to talk about the US election.

But we are going to discuss the accuracy of the polls, the power of advertising, and QAnon.

We will also talk trends in AI regulation with our special guest, Walter Pasquarelli, consultant at Oxford Insights and one of the authors of the report on government AI readiness, and weigh in on the recently announced acquisition of Xilinx by AMD.

AI Business · AI Business Podcast 11: AI and politics

According to Oxford Insights, the countries leading the charts in terms of government AI readiness are the US, the UK, and Finland.

However, when we look at the newly introduced ‘responsible use’ sub-index – which looks at inclusivity, accountability, transparency, and privacy – the top three are Estonia, Norway and Luxembourg. The UK is downgraded to number 22 and the US – to 24. China, unsurprisingly, comes bottom of the rankings.

Does this mean progress in AI and respect for human rights are mutually-exclusive concepts?

Meanwhile, in our ongoing Chip Wars segment, we talk about the recently announced mega-deal in which AMD is buying FPGA chip designer Xilinx, bringing its decades-old rivalry with Intel to a brand new arena – since Intel owns Altera, the only other major FPGA vendor.

This is the latest in a series of consolidation deals that saw Nvidia picking up Mellanox and make a $40bn offer for Arm, and Marvell spending $10 billion on networking silicon specialist Inphi. What else is out there? Should somebody buy MediaTek?

We also cover: Computational storage! Disgruntled engineers! Growing up in Latvia!

As always, you can find the people responsible for the circus podcast online: