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Google AI Technology

Google Cofounder Sergey Brin Warns of AI's Dark Side (wired.com) 79

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.

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Google Cofounder Sergey Brin Warns of AI's Dark Side

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    More like a virtue signal. A warning would come with specifics of things to look out for, details about what needs to be done to prevent bad stuff within his own company, etc.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Shifty that one.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    " loosely inspired by studies of the brain"

    Understatement of the year. There are many programmers today (and a lot more non-programmers) who think that neural nets are "smart" or have "thought processes" or are even conscious. Most neural nets are just a cascading if-then directed acyclic-graph and a weight assigned to each. It's a deterministic feature finder. We can't figured out "thought" processes for computers, and our neurons operate in a much more complicated way than backprop neural nets.

    • Most neural nets are just a cascading if-then directed acyclic-graph and a weight assigned to each.

      True. But the important point is that they learn those weights on their own, from examples, rather than being explicitly told.

    • In many cases itâ(TM)s very much like magic, that is exactly why there are many in our industry who are raising warnings - not about what AI is today, but what it has the capacity to become with ongoing advances of technology.

      Itâ(TM)s important to recognize that the primary virtue of machine learning is that, in many knowledge domain, it can vastly outperform software hand crafted by humans.

      We may write the âinterfaceâ(TM) and we may write the training software but, in many cases we don

      • Bullshit. Complete. Utter. Bullshit. Neural nets have been around since the 1940s. There hasn't been any sudden progress in them. This is just companies trying to create another VC hype market.
      • by Bongo ( 13261 )

        My layperson notion is that humans have two main modes of doing stuff. There's reason, where we split things into objects and use logic to connect them up, and this is a very powerful intelligence, as it basically sets us apart from other animals. But as those whacky old Greek philosophers knew, there are things which are not thing-enough, so they escape logic. That's the point of Zeno's Paradoxes, I guess.

        Meanwhile, there is the rest of the brain, which constructs our perceptions, and it does that in a way

    • If was just a DAG, it wouldn't need more than 2 layers... ever. A chain of a bunch of multiplies matrices is just a matrix. It's the back propagation that makes it mildly interesting. And back propagation makes a full graph (with cycles and all). But it's still missing something crucial that a brain does. So crucial, in fact, that you need larger and larger scale networks just to try to simulate it. Oh, and brains... well, most of them are not that intelligent, either.
    • NI has obviously substantially greater capabilities, in major qualitative areas, than AI today.

      We haven't entirely figured out "thought" processes for natural intelligence, and biological neurons are themselves much more complicated than a 'unit' in a backprop-trained multi-layer perceptron. But in the end, do we know what there is in natural intelligence that can't ever be re-implemented? Is there evidence this is so?

      To the contrary, there is increasing evidence that certain behaviors and perceptual capa
  • by djinn6 ( 1868030 ) on Sunday April 29, 2018 @03:49PM (#56525031)
    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.
    • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday April 29, 2018 @04:14PM (#56525121)

      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.

    • by mikael ( 484 ) on Sunday April 29, 2018 @04:16PM (#56525129)

      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.

    • by swell ( 195815 )

      The ORs have it: identify objects OR listen OR translate OR drive...

      Yes, one machine might assemble iPhones; another might navigate a vehicle; another might calculate your tax payment - but none will do ALL those things for a very long time. That requires intelligence, among other things like various appendages.

      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        another might navigate a vehicle; (...) but none will do ALL those things for a very long time.

        You think a self-driving car is one AI? I'm guessing it's at a minimum two, one image-recognition AI translating sensor data to objects and one driving AI working out the route. I think both because of resource limitations and to upgrade components we will have sub-AIs that deal with their little specialty, not so different from human brain centers and how when you learn to ride a bike it's stored somewhere, you don't figure it out from scratch. Like a chef AI would have a small "fillet a fish" sub-AI and t

    • by KidSock ( 150684 )

      Agreed. AI used to mean a computer that could "think". At least that's what people have been lead to believe. Over the years the term "AI" has been hijacked by companies who are clearly taking advantage of the misconception with advertisements for systems that talk to people about finding viruses and "healing" networks and other such nonsense. These programs are not "thinking" like a person and I don't believe they ever will simply because they do not have human experiences. They are simply sophisticated al

      • I kinda like it because then I can prove that I've been writing AI software since I was eight years old.

        Hello, what is your name?"

        John

        Hello John. How are you?

    • If you don't think computers are intelligent try some of the common chess programs. Yes, they have been around for many years and we do have the rules of chess programmed into them. But they do play uniques games that no mortal has ever played and they win. Try Lichess.org and play at level 8 against the machine. You might live long enough to win a game if you play chess endlessly. And that chess match is on a common game system. If you get into really advanced machines and programs the abilities of t
  • Lead by example? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ark1 ( 873448 ) on Sunday April 29, 2018 @03:50PM (#56525041)
    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-... [gizmodo.com]
  • everything online lasts forever.
  • Pffft. Everybody knows that Google's name really comes from Barney Google with his goo-goo-googley eyes.
    ==========
    Who's the most important man this country ever knew?
    Do you know what politician I have reference to?
    Well, it isn't Mr. Bryan, and it isn't Mr. Hughes.
    I've got a hunch that to that bunch I'm going to introduce:
    (Again you're wrong and to this throng I'm going to Introduce:)
    Barney Google, with the goo-goo-googley eyes.
    Barney Google bet his horse would win the prize.
    When the horses ran that day, Spa

  • Knowing how to optimise society for people might be just the job for a computer, as it sure isn't done very well by humans... of course, if the computer is owned by a mega-corporation then we have more reason to be sceptical. Hopefully someone is implementing the Three Laws.
  • The brain is a lot more complex than people are giving it credit. The whole body and brain is even more complex and it is a system that works together.
    Neural networks of today are nothing like how the brain works. (They are similar to how a neuron works)

    There are a few architectures that are used to simulate how the brain works on a computer (Cognitive Architectures), but they don't cover all aspects of them.(i.e. speech, cognition, emotion, creativity, reactive planning, complex situations, being above to

  • excellent technology and Google become an updated search engine
  • Seriously.

    We're already informed about the possible problems with supremely advanced AI.

    Does this mean we should just throw our wooden shoes into the gears and kick of the Butlerian Jihad now?

    Of course not.

    We still need to do as much research as possible on AI. So we can actually understand the delineation point between "Assistive software" and "Crazy, kill everything AI."

Sigmund Freud is alleged to have said that in the last analysis the entire field of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry.

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