Fears are beginning to grow over the potential for AI to pose a serious threat to humanity and some of the most powerful names in the tech sector have begun speaking out.
The most recent outcry came from Google chief Sundar Pichai who said the wrong deployment of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence technology could “cause a lot of harm on a societal level”.
Speaking in an interview with CBS, he said: “It can be very harmful if deployed wrongly and we don’t have all the answers there yet – and the technology is moving fast. So does that keep me up at night? Absolutely”.
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Mr. Pichai voiced his vast concerns over the fact that society needs to adapt to use AI technology.
Putting the threat into context, he warned that AI is set to “impact every product across every company”, and that “knowledge workers” such as writers, accountants, and software engineers are likely to be the most affected by this.
“For example, you could be a radiologist, if you think about five to 10 years from now, you’re going to have an AI collaborator with you,” he went on to say.
“You come in the morning, let’s say you have a hundred things to go through, it may say, ‘these are the most serious cases you need to look at first’”.
One example used by the tech giant boss was that this technology, with relative ease, will be able to generate fake media reports.
Describing the issue with that, he said on a “societal scale” such messages that can be easily made with AI “can cause a lot of harm”.
Although he is not suggesting that we completely abandon AI altogether he said it is vital that its use is regulated with laws that “align with human values including morality”.
“This is why I think the development of this needs to include not just engineers but social scientists, ethicists, philosophers, and so on,” he went on to say in the CBS interview.
In light of an onslaught of concern from some of the most knowledgeable people within the tech space, Google released a 20 page document listing its “recommendations for regulating AI”.
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