Latest press releases

Redazione ufficio stampa

Read the latest press releases and search the archives of TIM Group's Press Office. Read more

Artificial intelligence and TIM's ethics

Dealing with A.I. means imagining the future of citizens and corporate organizations. All aspects of contemporary society will be affected. Updated ethical rules and standards must be introduced and respected. TIM is at the forefront of this process.

09/30/2019 - 11:19 AM

Imagining the future of businesses, work and society means getting to grips with the developing technology that more than any other is transforming the world we live in: artificial intelligence. From medicine to robotics, from industry 4.0 to the future of self-driving cars and Smart Cities, there is no field that cannot be revolutionised by the most important innovation since electricity.

But the possibilities of artificial intelligence play a crucial role in telecom. Companies like TIM, for example, can exploit deep learning algorithms to optimise their processes, manage and automate their interactions with customers (for ever more personalised and efficient customer experience), react in real time to unforeseen events (crucial in cybersecurity, to take just one example) and much more besides.

 

The central role of big data

But if the engine in artificial intelligence is deep learning algorithms, the petrol that fuels them is big data, which once gathered and processed, can uncover correlations invisible to the human eyes. But where does this data come from?

That is simple. It comes from our online activity: interactions on social media, online shopping, Google searches, movements tracked on smartphones and even the temperature on our smart thermostat. Everything we do online, or on devices connected to the internet, leaves digital traces that can be used to personalise and optimise processes. And that is not all. In a future where all objects are connected to the Internet of Things, the data we use will grow exponentially. All fine, then? Not quite. Managing such a mass of data (much of it personal and private) demands competence, discretion, respect for users and the ability to properly manage the flows of big data. When these qualities are lacking, danger lurks just around the corner. Customers' data can be used as a weapon against them, as Tim Cook himself has warned.

The Apple CEO is one of many to have cautioned against the abuse of personal data. “Defending privacy means defending the unique nature of every individual. Having zero privacy is like being a butterfly that's caught and pinned up on display,” declared Oxford philosopher Luciano Floridi at a conference. In very brief summary, there are three guarantees that must absolutely be made by those who wish to gather and process the data of millions of users: respect for privacy, transparency and proper use of big data. If these guarantees are not upheld, customers' trust may be betrayed and black boxes (algorithms whose actions cannot be explained) created, spawning what are increasingly known as “algorithmic biases”, caused by improper use of data, with awful results (as the computer scientists say, “If you put in rubbish, rubbish is what's going to come out.”).

A further and increasingly evident spanner in the works is that the companies most at risk are often those whose core business is big data. OTT platforms, whose very being depends on big data (social networks, e-commerce platforms, search engines and many others), are forced to extract a growing quantity of data and find new uses all the time for the information they find. Their business model is based largely on ever more pervasive data collection, which risks becoming less than transparent, violating privacy and being misused, as numerous cases of discrimination and abuse by digital giants have shown.


TIM's ethical principles for Artificial Intelligence

 

How reliable is artificial intelligence?

This is what sets apart a company like TIM, for which big data represents added value and plays the crucial role of making the company's processes more efficient and providing customers with a personalised service that meets their demands in real time. Artificial intelligence is therefore the heart of TIM's approach to the digital transformation, including in the growing mass of data brought by the advent of 5G. All this will help optimise investments and manage an ever more complex infrastructure, improving safety and uncovering new opportunities in the correlations, invisible to the human eye, that AI can spot. But TIM will always use big data with respect for the basic principles of what the European Commission calls “trustworthy artificial intelligence”. In April 2019, the European Commission became the first body in the world to set out “Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence”. The document, written by 52 experts, states that deep learning systems should be "respecting [...] laws" and "ethical [...] values", always "taking into account its social environment".

That is not all. Deep learning systems should respect users' privacy, being transparent, understandable and free from social prejudices and benefit all of society, including in environmental terms. These are all principles TIM has officially made its own. “Ethics and competitiveness go hand in hand,” explains Pekka Ala-Pietilä, the head of a group of experts assembled by the European Commission. “We must create an environment in which AI is considered reliable. If this need becomes a reality, companies will have an incentive to create products and services for which ethics is a competitive advantage.” TIM is, then, in harmony with the values of digital innovation "made in Europe", which ensure proper conduct by users, partners and companies. And that is exactly why they are prompting another step forward, into the future.

 

Read more

5G Smart City

The full potential of 5G

Discover the door to "Internet of Everything"

Internet of Things

The numbers that count

All the Netbook updated figures