Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, has called for the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) in a piece for the Financial Times. Pichai started off the article by explaining how technology benefited him and topped it off by circling back explaining that for people in the future to be as excited about technology as he was, that AI must be “developed responsibly in a way that benefits everyone”.
In the piece, Pichai wrote about the good that AI has done for people but also reminded us of the negative impact it has had in the form of technologies such as deepfakes. In order to fight the misuse of the technology, Pichai said that the technology needs to be regulated and cannot be left for market forces to decide how it will be used. He said for regulation to work, there has to be international alignment and agreement on “core values”.
Discussing government regulation of AI, Pichai said that we don’t have to start from scratch as rules such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) can offer a “strong foundation”. He said that the existing frameworks, like GDPR, offer a good starting point for some AI uses such as medical devices but that they would need to be expanded upon for areas such as self-driving vehicles.
While Pichai’s desire for regulation may seem well-intentioned, caution must also be introduced when he says “sensible regulation must also take a proportionate approach, balancing potential harms, especially in high-risk areas, with social opportunities”; what may seem proportionate to a business looking to make money from data, may not seem proportionate to governments and users of the technologies.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens in terms of regulation of AI in the coming decade; will it go smoothly and offer users strong protections? Or will it turn into a quagmire as we see with different rates of tax being paid by tech firms in different countries?
Source: Financial Times
11 Comments - Add comment