TL;DR
Ulster University’s professor of artificial intelligence, Michaela Black, says Northern Ireland will not get the benefit of AI until public distrust is addressed — and that the distrust stems from an absence of basic education rather than from hostility to the technology. Her comments precede a free public seminar in Londonderry’s Guildhall next month.
Not a skills gap, a knowledge gap
The framing matters because it points somewhere different from the usual remedy. Most UK AI adoption diagnoses reach for workforce training: upskill employees, fund boot camps, close the productivity gap. Black, based at the Magee campus, is describing something upstream of that.
“Our biggest problem is that there is no citizens’ training for AI,” she told the Belfast Telegraph. People use it on their phones without registering that they are, she said, and others use it regularly without grasping how personal the data they hand over actually is. Some are talking to a chatbot without knowing it is one.
Her question is the one every adoption strategy skirts: “If you don’t really know what’s going on, do you really trust it?”
Distrust is not the same as refusal
Black is careful not to convert this into an argument for rejection. She described a friend with a visual impairment who, mistrusting the technology, turned down a pair of AI-powered glasses at first, then found they could read her letters aloud and help her arrange medical appointments. “The transformation of her life is phenomenal,” Black said.
The lesson she draws is about informed choice rather than encouragement. Access has to come “in multi-formats that everybody at every level of society can gain access to it when they’re comfortable to do so”, she said — a slower proposition than a national campaign, and a harder one to put on a delivery plan.
Looking forward
The seminar runs on Thursday 10 September, 6pm to 7.30pm, hosted by Ulster University’s Artificial Intelligence Collaboration Centre with AI for Collective Intelligence. It is open to anyone. The contrast with the rest of the UK conversation is instructive: the CBI spent this week asking for a national AI literacy standard aimed at workers, and Scottish manufacturers were found using AI daily while training almost nobody. Northern Ireland is comparatively under-examined in all of this, and Black’s argument is that starting with employers rather than citizens gets the sequence backwards.