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Ms Totten is Chief Marketing Officer of Akari, the company she co-founded in 2019 and which has reinforced her status as one of the UKs most influential technology thinkers. Her company is very probably unique in the UK and Scottish technology sector by being wholly-owned and led by an all-women executive team.

This woman from Glasgows East End, who still lives near childhood home, is helping to design the future of work and ensuring that the process is driven by empathy and compassion: virtues that are normally first to burn in the white heat of technology. Its a perception that Ms Totten is keen to dismantle.

Weve been very fortunate to have a close relationship with Microsoft and, as such, weve been in the midst of two big paradigm shifts: Covid-19, which ushered in a radically different working environment with people working remotely and moving towards a hybrid arrangement and the rise of AI and automation.

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Over the next five years, 500 million apps will be created, more than all that will have been produced in the previous four decades. A lot of IT departments aren't ready for that that change because it will be so explosive. It's as big as the Industrial Revolution.

Im glad she mentioned Artificial Intelligence before I did. Doesnt it, by its very definition, threaten to reduce the vast majority of those workers possessing an older skill-set to the status of disposable drones, eventually to be deemed surplus to the requirements of super-intelligence systems?

She dismantles my summation rather elegantly. If you'd asked me 10 years ago to think about AI Id have thought of the negative connotations. My skillset is in sales and marketing. Why have a marketing manager in charge when something like ChatGBT can supply your web copy? However while these chat bots and such like may regurgitate certain word patterns, they don't replace the human spark of imagination. Chat GBT and AI are the doers, but we're still the thinkers. They do what we tell them to do. So I think it supplements rather than replaces.

In manufacturing they've been using automation a lot longer than us. My gran worked in a major Glasgow biscuit factory right up until she retired in her 60s. She saw a lot of change occur with automation, but she didnt lose her job. For her and her fellow workers it freed up the tiresome stuff and allowed them to focus on the important things. It allowed them to be seen.

We saw a lot of academic disparity during Covid. If you were at school in a fairly affluent area or a private school, you didn't lose out on school time. Everything kept running through technology. But this same technology can teach skills that allow children to catch up on missed work far more rapidly.

Margaret Totten (Image: free)

Maybe so, I say, but during the pandemic there were many children living in households or neighbourhoods for whom a laptop or a tablet might be considered an unaffordable luxury.

For me, AI can help bridge that gap. If you've got someone who is struggling with a concept, and they don't have the same access to a tutor or a teacher, or in some cases, even the parent, they can ask it. I think AI and automation will become far more of a leveller than it will be a destroyer.

And so, we talk about all the untapped talents that lie dormant in Scotlands most disadvantaged neighbourhoods and the way in which children from these places are judged and found wanting just because of the way they speak. And how little weight is given to achievements gained in the face of profound social and economic adversities.

When I co-founded Akari a big part of it was embedding inclusion, and especially around empowering females in the workplace. But two other areas have also demanded our focus; one being neuro-diversity.

At a Microsoft conference we discussed why only about 10% of adults with autism were in full-time paid employment and why only 18% of children with autism are currently in higher education. And that's a massive disconnect to me as a mother of a son with high functioning autism who's always gone to a mainstream school and who is thriving.

How, in this so-called progressive country can 90% of a group of people be unemployed? It doesn't make sense. The other area is this definition of socio-economic equality. The postcode I grew up in has one of the worst life expectancies in Europe, which is crazy in this affluent nation. So how do you challenge that? So we took children from these areas over to Microsoft and tried to encourage them with one of mums old maxims: if you can see it, you can believe it and if you can believe it, you can be it. She always wanted me to look at things and see what I can achieve rather than what I couldnt.

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So, how did this woman, one of the UKs most influential tech innovators prevail in a world almost exclusively reserved for men? Why did she even want to choose this terrain, given the barriers she knew would be put in her way? She credits her time at St Mungos Academy, one of Glasgows most famous old comprehensive schools and the influence of two teachers.

I was the only girl in my class doing Higher Computing higher. I was never made to feel different. I loved computing and I'm very, very geeky. I was into Star Wars and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and comic books. But as someone who loves reading and who loves sci-fi, the internet opened up a whole new world and I was designing specialist fan websites for Buffy. You had to teach yourself these skills and that progressed into working as a business analyst. I became very good at Excel and 20 years ago that opened a lot of doors.

Shes dismissive of the concept of progressiveness as weaponised by the Scottish Government and the fake actors who brandish it to signify radicalism. Progressiveness must come with a plan, or else its meaningless, she says. "We have shared values with our Chair, Stuart Fenton and Andrea Bright our CEO. They are two people with whom I chose to work because they share the same values and the same authentically progressive ideas as me.

"One of the reasons Stuart wanted to work with Akari is that he was concerned by the huge number of lay-offs in the tech world, which he felt were unnecessary. He once told me: This is a sector which is making billions and consistently growing and making profits and yet there are tens of thousands of lay-offs across the board. He thought there was a way to do better. So he got together with us, a data company which is now opening 30, 40, 50 new roles.

Andrea shares that vision, which is that real progressiveness is about promoting equality and compassion, but doing it with a plan that leads to real results. Without this all youll have are a couple of nice soundbites and some nice feelings, but no real progression because you didnt plan for it. So we are a very progressive organisation, but in the real sense of the word.

Shed like to see the Scottish Government engage much more with firms such as Akari, who are in the vanguard of shaping the future of work across the globe and developing best employment practice in doing so.

They need to be pushing modern apprenticeships and different routes of entry into the market. There needs to be education across the board about how you can access roles in technology. This is a growing sector and it will continue to grow.

Its a very innovative sector. Were now talking about automation and AI on a scale never before seen. This equates to new roles that need to be opened and so, we need to open up the framework to allow people access to them? One way is through modern apprenticeships. Do we need to revamp the modern apprenticeship programme?

The Scottish Government need to open up those routes to entry and they have to be supporting graduates and apprenticeships. So, where are the programmes which allow us to take on some graduates and apprentices? Why is nobody knocking on our door and those of other successful firms in this sector, and all domiciled in Scotland.

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Kevin McKenna meets tech thinker Margaret Totten | HeraldScotland - HeraldScotland

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Those 'Mrs. Davis' Sneakers Are Real and You Can Buy Them Now - Yahoo News

The head of the worlds largest sovereign wealth fund has called on governments to speed up the regulation of artificial intelligence as it revealed it would set guidelines for how the 9,000 companies it invests in should use AI ethically.

Nicolai Tangen, chief executive of Norways $1.4tn oil fund which owns on average 1.5 per cent of every listed company globally said he believed that there is not enough regulation of the fast-growing sector and that he wanted new rules to govern how AI is used.

We think authorities and governments should regulate. We are not seeing a pipeline of regulation coming yet, he added.

The fund is a big investor in tech companies such as Apple, Alphabet, Nvidia and Microsoft, which are all aiming to use AI to transform their businesses.

Tangen said the fund would unveil a set of standards in August for how it wants companies that use AI to behave. That would bring it into the fund's responsible investment framework, which sets the standards for ESG investing in Europe given its huge size.

Governments around the world are grappling with whether and how to regulate AI or to give innovation a free hand amid worries about how far superintelligent computers could go if left unchecked. The EU is drafting what is seen as the toughest rules currently on AI.

The oil fund will also consider whether to use AI to help it with proxy voting on tens of thousands of motions at next years annual shareholder meetings when it reviews the current season in the autumn, its chief corporate governance and compliance officer, Carine Smith Ihenacho, said in the same interview.

Tangen, who has also warned that climate change will keep inflation high, said the fund was already using advanced algorithms to reduce trading costs and complexity and to boost internal productivity.

Im super excited by AI. We have a target for increasing efficiency in the fund by 10 per cent over the next 12 months. Its a big hairy goal. We are seeing it in so many places where its driving efficiency, Tangen said.

The fund makes 36mn trades a year, and Tangen believes AI can help it eliminate trades, for instance different rebalancing models that currently could push it to buy a stock one day and sell it the next.

The way we are putting money into the market, we are using AI models to predict when in the day, or over the month- or quarter-end we should deploy the capital. We are reducing trading activity because we are using AI models, he said.

So you can reduce the number of trades, and there are huge savings to be had there too, he said, adding that: Its not like its on complete autopilot. We are monitoring it. Its not like were the giving the fund to robots, and saying hey, see you later.

Tangen said the fund had a big project with a very big but undisclosed goal to cut trading costs significantly by changing other things such as how it incentivises portfolio managers as well as using AI.

Last week the fund held its own hackathon involving 130 people looking at how the sovereign wealth fund can best use AI itself.

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Norway's $1.4tn wealth fund calls for state regulation of AI - Financial Times

Ms Wikramanayake acknowledged Australia was not isolated from the uncertainty that has hindered growth in larger economies such as the US and the European Union.

She said central banks from the US Federal Reserve to the Reserve Bank of Australia needed to respond to heightened inflationary pressures and cool these forces.

[The] pandemic caused the lockdown of economies and that led to enormous fiscal stimulus. Now weve ended up with huge inflation that has been impacted by geopolitical impacts weve seen, Ms Wikramanayake said.

To counter the effects from extreme stimulus, central banks have raised interest rates, which has compounded living costs and corporate borrowing costs.

The Macquarie chief, however, said base rates were not at the highs of the late 1990s, and that Australia was well placed to weather rate increases.

[Interest rates] went down to near zero, and now they have picked up to the threes, but that is still below the highs. Yes, it is impacting households and businesses, but at this level, both the inflation and interest rates, we should be more resilient than other economies, she said.

As borrowing costs have surged, Ms Wikramanayake called out the growing role private capital plays in funding corporate Australia.

She said private capital accounted for 40 per cent of Australian mergers and acquisition activity last year, and singled out the evolution of the superannuation funds, which are participating in more M&A activity.

The super pool is over $3 trillion now. Weve seen the evolution of that pool, a lot of consolidation with fewer, but bigger, funds, Ms Wikramanayake said.

They are also internalising their investing functions, particularly for listed bonds and equities.

Looking ahead, the bank chief said artificial intelligence was here to stay and that corporate Australia needed to leverage these technology developments to drive business.

At Macquarie, for example, AI had proved a pivotal tool when onboarding customers to its digital bank, she said. Hiring, too, was more focused on data analysis, technology and operational risk roles.

Machine learning and AI, especially learning AI like ChatGPT. Sure, you have heard about being wiped out as a human race. Yes there are challenges, but there are huge opportunities, she said.

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Macquarie chief Shemara Wikramanayake believes greater ... - The Australian Financial Review