Tech for Good: Marcus Smith speaks to Kriti Sharma

What do you think of when you hear the words "A.I." or "Artificial Intelligence"? Thanks to science-fiction it's often strange-looking humanoids or futuristic robots hell-bent on destruction. But as Kriti Sharma points out, we are probably using A.I. hundreds of times a day without even thinking about it. It could be, she says, a bank deciding whether to accept or reject your application, or an algorithm might decide whether you get a job interview or what exam grade you receieve. She made her first robot when she was a teenager, and has gone on to use A.I. to help the victims of domestic abuse and to challenge the rise of what she sees as subservient female online assistants. Kriti is now an advisor on A.I. to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

Marcus Smith is a content creator from Bristol and a digital native. He is fascinated by technology's impact on us and has studied the effects of online gambling on young people. For 'One to One', Marcus is looking at the 'tech for good' movement and speaks to two leading figures in the tech industry - one who argues that it is currently a force for bad, and one who tries to work with tech to harness the good.

For this second programme, Marcus asks Kriti why she thinks A.I. often has in-built gender and race biases, and hears how she is tackling this by inviting more people from varied backgrounds into the design process.

Producer: Toby Field