Google Cofounder Sergey Brin Warns of AI's Dark Side (wired.com)

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has warned that the current boom in artificial intelligence has created a "technology renaissance" that contains many potential threats. In the company's annual Founders' Letter, the Alphabet president struck a note of caution. "The new spring in artificial intelligence is the most significant development in computing in my lifetime," writes Brin. "Every month, there are stunning new applications and transformative new techniques." But, he adds, "such powerful tools also bring with them new questions and responsibilities." From a report: When Google was founded in 1998, Brin writes, the machine learning technique known as artificial neural networks, invented in the 1940s and loosely inspired by studies of the brain, was "a forgotten footnote in computer science." Today the method is the engine of the recent surge in excitement and investment around artificial intelligence. The letter unspools a partial list of where Alphabet uses neural networks, for tasks such as enabling self-driving cars to recognize objects, translating languages, adding captions to YouTube videos, diagnosing eye disease, and even creating better neural networks.

Brin nods to the gains in computing power that have made this possible. He says the custom AI chip running inside some Google servers is more than a million times more powerful than the Pentium II chips in Google's first servers. In a flash of math humor, he says that Google's quantum computing chips might one day offer jumps in speed over existing computers that can be only be described with the number that gave Google its name, a googol, or a 1 followed by 100 zeroes.

As you might expect, Brin expects Alphabet and others to find more uses for AI. But he also acknowledges that the technology brings possible downsides. "Such powerful tools also bring with them new questions and responsibilities," he writes. AI tools might change the nature and number of jobs, or be used to manipulate people, Brin says -- a line that may prompt readers to think of concerns around political manipulation on Facebook. Safety worries range from "fears of sci-fi style sentience to the more near-term questions such as validating the performance of self-driving cars," Brin writes.

Comments

Re:Weird Al

[LifesABeach]

Has anyone else noticed that the people that are touting the ills of AI are the same ones that are using AI to take your money?

Overstating what "AI" can do

[djinn6]

It's not really artificial intelligence yet. Sure 95% of the time it can identify objects in a picture, or listen to an audio recording and transcribe the text 90% correctly, or translate from one language to another 60% of the time, or drive a car in 98% of the situations. That makes it a bit smarter than a chimp perhaps, but "intelligent"?

As always, it's the 80% of the features that take 20% of the work. The remaining 20% is the hard part.

Re:Overstating what "AI" can do

[ShanghaiBill]

It's not really artificial intelligence yet.

Yes it is. When researchers and practitioners say "AI" they don't mean human-level Hollywood AI. Machine learning is a subset of AI.

That makes it a bit smarter than a chimp perhaps, but "intelligent"?

State-of-the-art AI is nowhere near the intelligence of a chimp. Not even close.

Re:Overstating what "AI" can do

[mikael]

Its when the accuracy becomes better than a human then it becomes a problem. Some people like oncology radiologists, their job is looking at X-ray, MRI and CAT scans and identifying when a fuzzy white blob is cancer or not. There were people who made their living from creating books for the blind by reciting the words. They lost that living when smartphones and home computers could do that automatically.

Lead by example?

[ark1]

Brin warns of AI yet his own employees have spoken against Google's involvement in a Pentagon - Google partnership involving AI and military drones. https://gizmodo.com/thousands-...