Dr Rebecca Pope is former lead data scientist and now head of data science and engineering at KPMG UK and is an expert in healthcare and AI. At a recent panel debate, she gave her views on automation in healthcare and IBM Watson, and held a strong opinion on why the UK is falling behind in the race to lead AI globally.
In regard to the nation that will dominate in artificial intelligence in the future, Pope thinks this will be China because of its “hell-bent view on education." In contrast, she feels that in the UK, the current model of educational progression will not suffice for a future which will require the continuous learning necessary for the development of AI.
She added that education will not only have to continuous but equitable and therefore accessible to people who live in rural areas, are from poorer backgrounds and haven’t attended university.
Pope said that if we think of artificial intelligence jobs and skills as a race between ourselves and other tech nations, we will lose because we lack the infrastructure to educate young people and ourselves, and we are too far behind in how we educate and upskill our workforce.
People will have to take the initiative to re-educate themselves through portals such as Coursera so they can learn new skills such as how to do a lambda function to apply across a series, said Pope.
She also said that she has contributed to a report on the matter. “We have written at KMPG ‘How does the UK win the AI race globally?’ and I say in that, we won’t. We won’t because we’re way too far behind in how we educate and how we upskill our workforce.”
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