“ALPHA10X Emerges from Stealth With $9.4 Million In Seed Funding and Expands Leadership Team to Bring Artificial Intelligence to Life Sciences Investment” caught my attention. I am always interested in new applications of #ArtificialIntelligence and mistakenly thought that this startup applied analytics to medical research or patient outcomes. We are still in a pandemic with a broken healthcare system and overloaded medical professionals. Imagine my disappointment to realize that they acquired seed funding to make billionaire investors richer by smarter investments in ‘life sciences’, i.e. the amazingly profitable healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. That got me wondering how #eDiscovery analytics are and will be applied outside of our judicially regulated legal space.
Analytic visualizations and machine learning driven categorization have already crept into enterprise compliance, security, and other adjacent spaces. Attenex, Brainspace and Content Analyst were acquired by well-funded FTI, Relativity and RevealData. Now they have enterprise offerings in compliance, surveillance and contract intelligence. Do not get me wrong, I see nothing wrong or evil in the appropriate application of artificial intelligence to reduce risk and improve business processes. I also do not see anything unethical with ALPHA10X’s A.I. driven market analysis platform. Authoritarian states give us plenty of examples of how A.I. can be used to the detriment of mankind. It is all about transparency with check and balances to prevent our innovations from being turned against us.
The tone and soothing palette in Microsoft’s Viva daily briefings make it clear that they are very aware of how employees might see the A.I. monitoring of their work time as being very Orwellian. I have spent far too many hours digging into what user actions and data could be harvested for processing through Azure Cognitive Services or other platforms. Enough to understand that digital Big Brother could be implemented in any large enterprise professional environment. Hence my question of whether we will use these amazing technologies for the betterment of knowledge workers or to maximize shareholder value at their expense. I have spent my career using, promoting, and even creating enterprise systems to meet legal and #infogov requirements. In retrospect, I wish that I had applied my efforts to make tools that improved people’s quality of life and work balance. Analytics have improved the sometimes-miserable process of linear review, manual redactions, and privilege review. We can do better. We should do better. Our innovations should be focused on eliminating ‘the treadmill’ in legal and the rest of our digital service economy. Enough of this soap box for now. Tell me if you see the similarities in these visualizations.
Attenex Patterns document viewer
Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Contact him directly for a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.
Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer a journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations.
See Greg’s latest pic on Instagram.
Given that China and Brazil have passed, and the EU may soon pass laws governing “trust” in AI, the horse is leaving the barn. Whether Congress will follow suit is anyone’s guess given the gridlock infecting Capital Hill. With the breakup of Watson and the divestment of huge EPHI databases built “for profit,” I’m not sure we’ll ever get to a place of “Don’t do evil” AI systems. But we will use them, like it or not. Moreover the algorithms are just the tip of the iceberg. Anyone who attended the last session of the ASU-Arkfeld e-Discovery conference in 2017… Read more »