Page 17 - Monocle Quarterly Journal Vol 3 Issue 2 Spring

invisible. Yet we live in a time of inexpensive, limitless digital storage and fast Internet connections that transcend national boundaries. It doesn’t take much to connect the dots: from start to finish, inception to global media distribution, the next revolution will be digitised.” This is the possibility that unsupervised deep-learning AI presents us with, through its ability to isolate potentially dangerous transactions and connect this to other information that would enable us to answer questions such as “Where did the money come from?”, “Where is it going?” and “Who will benefit from this?” AI can collect and process vast amounts of data and find – in moments – connections that a human would take hours, days, weeks, or even years to see, if they see it at all. And one of its most important applications is undoubtedly in the world of banking, where the detection of patterns or trends that indicate suspicious or irregular activity could not only prevent an expensive financial fallout, but protect people on a mass scale from the various criminal forces that threaten their safety.
But this momentous opportunity also presents a critical new challenge, because how do we decide who is allowed access to such unlimited and intimate information about people? Just over a month after 9/11, with an overwhelming majority in Congress, the US Patriot Act was signed into law, giving the government unprecedented powers to potentially invade personal lives through monitoring and surveillance
activities. A number of legal challenges
to the Act ensued, with courts agreeing
that certain of its provisions were un-
constitutional, and amendments were
made. But the US’s eagerness to spy
on its citizens was highlighted again
in 2013 as a result of the Edward
Snowden National Security Agency
leak, which revealed that the US was
monitoring even innocent civilians
through various surveillance programs.
More recently, the act of spying outside
of government surveillance activities
has gone digital, with it having
become evident the extent to which
Big Tech companies are monitoring
our lives. From the websites we visit,
to our likes, dislikes and moods, to our
most intimate messages and pictures –
everything we do is being examined, recorded and used to predict what our future actions and intentions may be. And as AI advances, the inferences that will be made will only grow more invasive.
If banks were allowed to collect data about customers and counterparties and share it with each other, as well as access information from media and Big Tech companies, we would undoubtedly be living in a safer world. But it would be one that has been deeply sanitised and that risks undermining the personal rights and freedoms of all
BANKING AND THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION
But this momentous opportunity also presents a critical new
challenge, because how do we decide who is allowed access to
such unlimited and intimate information about people?
people. For the moment, at least, AI does offer individual institutions the possibility of accessing the data that could be used – under the guidance of strict international regulations – to predict the actions of corrupt parties before they can commit grave injustices, or perhaps even to prevent the most tragic world events.
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