Behind the Manchester Prize: Reflections from Hayaatun Sillem (16/07/24)

In this blog, Manchester Prize Judge Hayaatun Sillem shares her thoughts on the finalist teams and reflects on the wider changes needed when it comes to employing AI to tackle environmental issues

As CEO of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation, the question of how we can stimulate technology development and deployment for social good is a daily preoccupation. This is reflected in the Academy’s overarching goal of harnessing the power of engineering to build a sustainable society and an inclusive economy that works for everyone. As a suite of technologies, AI offers immense potential to enhance and unlock capability in engineered systems that can in turn drive economic growth, improve service productivity and deliver positive social impacts.

We heard from the Academy’s dialogue with communities in Belfast, as part of our People’s AI Stewardship Summit series, that there is hope that AI can deliver visible local value – for example, in improving access to healthcare. And as we have observed with the entrepreneurs we support via the Academy’s Enterprise Hub, the most meaningful innovations are those that target a known problem and are designed with the needs of the diversity of users in mind.

So, it was a great pleasure to participate in judging the first round of the Manchester Prize, alongside an array of experts spanning different facets of AI and its relevance to society. The pleasure was also accompanied by a degree of pain as the range and diversity of applications made choosing between them less than straightforward! But above all, it was an inspiring and hopeful experience to see the breadth of organisations and teams collaborating to solve some of the very real challenges facing the UK.

“It was an inspiring and hopeful experience to see the breadth of organisations and teams collaborating to solve some of the very real challenges facing the UK.”

I was also delighted that the inaugural Manchester Prize focused on energy, environment and infrastructure-oriented solutions which directly connect with priorities that feel relevant not just to policymakers, but also to many citizens. For similar reasons, these topics feature highly in the Academy’s work too. For example, the Academy hosts the National Engineering Policy Centre which recently published Testing the waters: reducing health risks from water pollution  so it was great to see Sapphire’s work on better evidence-based flow management, which has the potential to reduce public health risk from sewage pollution in our waterways.

It was also exciting to see AssetScan using AI to identify defects in our ageing infrastructure assets which, in the future, could help us avoid the kinds of disruption that we’ve seen caused by the legacy of Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete in our schools and hospitals. Improving the resilience of our infrastructure has been a key area of concern for the Academy, not least because of the risks posed to the public by failure to ensure this. Innovations such as those developed by AssetScan can provide us with valuable new tools to reduce the costs and improve the effectiveness of the monitoring required to enable resilience.

To provide a final example, Greyparrot Insight is offering insights for better management of global waste flows, which is critical to improving existing waste management practices and supporting design-for-waste principles and safer, more sustainable waste policies in the longer term. This resonates strongly with the Academy’s EngineeringX collaboration with Lloyds Register Foundation dedicated to safer end of engineered life, an area which has not received the attention it deserves in light of its impacts for sustainability and human health and wellbeing. 

“The UK has enormous strengths in AI, innovation and entrepreneurship, and we will need to make the most of all these to ensure that today’s innovators become tomorrow’s agents of positive social change.”

We are in an innovation-rich era, with AI exemplifying the scale of the opportunity perhaps more than any other set of technologies. However, it is increasingly obvious that we will need to be acutely intentional and thoughtful about how we strike the right balance between exploiting the upside opportunity and managing the downside risk. Failure to do so could have unacceptable costs, whether through environmental impacts, reinforcement of societal inequalities or disruption to democratic processes and social cohesion. 

As we look to use AI to help us solve ever more complex economic and social challenges, we will undoubtedly have to evolve our approach to regulating and managing the development and application of these technologies. But there is much that we already know which can help us proceed responsibly, drawing on established practices and guardrails. For example, users should be able to have a clear understanding of the product’s limitations – these could be related to the data, model parameters, training or the deployment scenario. Systems need to be designed in a way that enables transparency and provides the opportunity for redress when things go wrong. And we need to invest in the workforce developing the software that is becoming increasingly embedded in our lives, ensuring professionalism and ethical practice is the norm, and that the diversity of those driving the technology is more reflective of the society it impacts.

In addition, the AI systems themselves, encompassing algorithms, compute, data, networks and storage, urgently need to become more environmentally sustainable if we are to avoid locking ourselves into a pathway that could significantly undermine progress made on decarbonisation across the wider economy. 

Innovators across the ages have been critical enablers of so much of human progress – and that continues to be the case today. The Manchester Prize provides a very welcome opportunity to showcase some of the innovators who are currently working to improve our lives, as well as providing a turbo boost to their chances of success. The UK has enormous strengths in AI, innovation and entrepreneurship, and we will need to make the most of all these to ensure that today’s innovators become tomorrow’s agents of positive social change.