Eric Schmidt Says Fears About Artificial Intelligence are 'Misguided'

 Artificial Intelligence  

According to Google's Eric Schmidt, people have been concerned about machines taking over the world for centuries, and the recent high profile warnings about AI are "misguided."

Eric Schmidt, chief executive at Google says fears over artificial intelligence and robots replacing humans in jobs are “misguided”. He says AI is likely going to make humanity better.

“These concerns are normal,” he said during a talk the Financial Times Innovate America event in New York this week. "Go back to the history of the loom. There was absolute dislocation… but I think all of us are better off with more mechanized ways of getting clothes made."

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Schmidt demonstrated his point by highlighting how economies have prospered over the years: “There's lots of evidence that when computers show up, wages go up and there’s a lot of evidence that people who work with computers are paid more than people without,” he said.

According to Schmidt, people who don’t currently work with computers should learn to do so quickly, saying that the “correct concern is what we're going to do to improve the education systems and incentive systems globally, in order to get people prepared for this new world, so they can maximize their income.”

Schmidt argues that machines are a lot more basic than people think they are. He described an experiment that Google carried out three years ago, which was created to see what an artificial ‘brain’ could learn. 10 million still images were fed into the ‘brain’ - a network of 1,000 computers programmed to soak up information in the same way a human brain does.

“It discovered the concept of ‘cat’,” Schmidt said. “I'm not quite sure what to say about that, except that that's where we are.”

According to many though, Google and other organizations' rapid advances in artificial intelligence are a real threat.  Famously, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have recently put forth multiple statements on the subject. Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, told the BBC that AI “could spell the end of the human race".

Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2014

Recently, Google acquired DeepMind a London-based AI start-up that just unveiled a computer prototype that is capable of mimicking specific aspects of the human brain’s activity. DeepMind's system has been shown to be able to play video games in a similar way to humans.

According to a research paper produced by  DeepMind, the computer prototype acts a kind of neural Turing machine, which can access an external memory like a conventional Turing machine. Reportedly it “takes inspiration from both models of biological working memory and the design of digital computers.”

Google now owns Boston Dynamics, makers of the ATLAS humanoid robot

Google has also recently purchased multiple robotics companies, including Nest, Boston Dynamics, Meka and Redwood Robotics which make humanoid robots, and Industrial Perception, a company which has developed computer vision systems and robot arms for loading and unloading trucks. Also, Google has intensively been developing self driving cars for many years now.

DeepMind's Shane Legg said in an interview earlier this year that artificial intelligence is the “number one risk for this century”, and believes it could contribute to human extinction. “Eventually, I think human extinction will probably occur, and technology will likely play a part in this.”

Legg and DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis even made it a condition that Google form an AI ethics board as part of the sale of their company. The board was put in place to ensure the technology is developed safely and in such a way that mitigates the existential risks of AI.

In a recent piece in MIT Technology Review, about Hassabis Tom Simonite writes,

Hassabis’s reluctance to talk about applications might be coyness, or it could be that his researchers are still in the early stages of understanding how to advance the company’s AI software. One strong indicator that Hassabis believes progress toward a powerful new form of AI will be swift is that he is setting up an ethics board inside Google to consider the possible downsides of advanced artificial intelligence. “It’s something that we or other people at Google need to be cognizant of. We’re still playing Atari games currently,” he says, laughing. “But we are on the first rungs of the ladder.”

Hassabis can be seen explaining DeepMind's video game playing AI below:

"Last time I checked, we had the power cord in our hand."

As an at-its-core artificial intelligence company, Schmidt needs to downplay the risks of the technology.  The company's longstanding motto is, “don't be evil.”

In the end though Schmidt is confident humans will have control, saying that if AI somehow took over the human race it would have to happen “behind our backs.” “Last time I checked, we had the power cord in our hand.”


SOURCE  Newsweek, 9 to 5 Google

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