By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 18th, 2024
Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai thinks AI could cause serious harm in different sectors if society does not brace for it.
According to Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) CEO Sundar Pichai, society needs to brace itself for the far-reaching impact of artificial intelligence (AI). In a recent media session, Pichai opined that AI acceleration might distort everyday life without proper guiding measures. Warning that AI advancement laws are “not for a company to decide” alone, Pichai believes AI will impact “every product of every company”.
In the interview, the Google CEO suggested that it would be imprudent to try and play catch up to AI technologies already launched. Interviewer Scott Pelley concurred with Pichai’s assessment after test-running several Google AI projects and marveling at their human-like capabilities. After interacting with tools like Google’s Bard chatbot, Pelley said he was “speechless” and described the experience as “unsettling”.
Google CEO Describes in Detail How AI Could Impact Jobs
Describing how AI could impact jobs if society fails to adapt to its technology fast enough, Pichai explained:
“For example, you could be a radiologist; if you think about five to ten years from now, you’re going to have an AI collaborator with you. 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.”
The Google chief executive also added that jobs likely disrupted by AI would comprise “knowledge workers”, including writers, architects, and accountants. In addition, Pichai also believes that AI could affect even the software engineers that create these sentient technologies.
Pichai pointed out that disinformation, fake news, and fake images could compound the problems associated with AI adaptation. Although Google is planning the public testing of some of its newly-launched AI products, the CEO believes “things will go wrong.” Pichai states, “user feedback is critical to improving the product and the underlying technology.” He added, “as more people start using Bard and testing its capabilities, they’ll surprise us,” but “we’ll learn from it.” Pichai also stressed that Google’s ultimate goal is to “keep iterating and improving” its artificial intelligence products and offerings. Recapping major milestones in Google’s strides in the AI space, the chief executive enthused:
“We should be proud of this work and the years of tech breakthroughs that led us here, including our 2017 Transformer research and foundational models such as PalM and BERT.”
AI Race
Last month, Google launched its Bard AI chatbot as an experimental product to the public. By offering early access to Bard to select customers in the US and UK, the tech giant hopes to rival the Microsoft-associated ChatGPT. In January, Microsoft announced that its Bing search engine would incorporate OpenAI’s GPT technology. This announcement garnered global attention and set tongues wagging in the revolutionary AI and tech space.
At the time, ChatGPT was only a few months old, having been launched late last year by the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI. Nonetheless, the chatbot has taken the tech space by storm since its inception. So far, it has inspired similar product offerings from other major tech players.