Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai has warned that the world needs to be prepared for the widespread impact of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, which may reshape all industries.
“As a society, we need to adapt to it,” Pichai said in an interview with CBS “60 Minutes” over the weekend.
“I’ve always thought of AI as probably the most profound technology that humanity will ever develop. It’s more profound than fire or electricity or any of the previous things we’ve done,” said Pichai. He added that society and the law must move quickly to adapt AI regulations that are “aligned with human values and ethical principles,” but he noted that it’s not up to individual companies to make such rules.
“This isn’t something that a company can just decide,” Pichai said. “That’s why I think the development of this area needs to include not just engineers, but social scientists, ethicists, philosophers, and so on.” Google has already proposed its own suggestions for regulating AI.
Pichai said that, “on the one hand,” he thinks society isn’t yet ready for high-performance AI systems, “because our ability to think through and adapt to machines is far slower than the pace of technological development.”
He said that, unlike previous technological revolutions, experts have issued warnings earlier about the “impact” of AI, which is beneficial for society.
“AI will impact every company’s product,” Pichai said, adding that AI will disrupt “knowledge workers,” such as writers, architects, accountants, and software engineers.
“For example, you might be a radiologist and from now on, in the next five to ten years, you might have an AI collaborator with you. You come in the morning and assume you have a hundred things to do, it might say, ‘These are the most serious cases you need to look at first.'”
Google released an AI chatbot called “Bard” to a limited audience in March, but it did not receive the same acclaim as OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot. Microsoft’s Bing, Google’s competitor, announced earlier this year that its software engine will include ChatGPT technology. On Sunday, it was reported that Google employees are now rapidly updating their search engine and creating a new AI-driven search engine to compete with others that have already adopted AI technology.
According to The New York Times, Google’s new search engine is being built under a project called “Magi,” and a team of engineers, executives, and others have created the platform. The search engine aims to be more personalized than the current engine and will attempt to predict user requests.
The controversy over AI technology gained international attention in March when thousands of tech experts, leaders, and others signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on creating powerful AI systems. Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak were among the prominent signatories, warning that “AI could pose profound risks to society and humanity.”
ChatGPT Says It Can Do Jobs Better Than Humans, Potentially Leading to Millions of Job Losses
In recent news, ChatGPT has listed out jobs it can potentially do better than humans, which could lead to the loss of millions of jobs.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a US job placement and executive coaching firm, recently posed a series of questions to ChatGPT’s AI robot, including “What jobs can ChatGPT replace?”
The robot told the job placement firm that it could potentially replace repetitive and predictable positions, as well as jobs that require language skills.
According to the robot, these fields include customer service representatives, translators and interpreters, technical writers, content writers, and data entry clerks.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas calculated the number of job positions in each of these listed fields using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and found that at least 4.8 million US job positions could potentially be replaced.
The AI chatbot further added that it could potentially enter other fields such as data science, machine learning, mathematics and statistics, computer science, robotics and automation, as well as business.
Currently, AI is viewed as a tool to assist employees in their work rather than replace their roles. Of course, predictive language models can be used for task automation, allowing employees to focus on tasks that involve higher-level thinking.
When asked about how AI systems can sometimes “hallucinate” and “fabricate incorrect but plausible-sounding information,” an OpenAI spokesperson said that OpenAI’s mission is to use AI to “enhance people’s job capabilities” rather than eliminate employment opportunities.
