Google Warns Artificial Intelligence Will Destroy Jobs

(ReclaimingAmerica.net) – Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai has warned that artificial intelligence will unleash wide-ranging employment disruptions.

Pichai told the CBS program “60 Minutes” that “we need to adapt as a society” to the upcoming disruptions since AI would affect “every product of every company.”

It will also impact the jobs of “knowledge workers” such as architects, accountants, writers, and even software engineers, the Google chief added, as cited by CNBC and Newsmax.

“For example, you could be a radiologist. If you think about five to 10 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,’” Pinchai explained.

The program showed interviewer Scott Pelley as he viewed and tried several of Google’s AI projects.

Pelley said the projects left him “speechless,” and he thought they were “unsettling.”

The journalist was shown viewing Google’s DeepMind, where robots play soccer after learning it and receiving an apple from a robot that fetched it from a countertop.

Answering a question about the potential harm that AI could cause, Pinchai said artificial intelligence could make fake news, disinformation, and doctored images “much bigger,” which would “cause harm.”

He added that human society would have to adapt quickly to AI technology such as Google’s chatbot Bard – including legislation punishing abuse and international treaties on making AI safe.

According to the Google chief, the rules for artificial intelligence would have to “align with human values, including morality.” However, that left the question of who should make the AI rules open.

“It’s not for a company to decide. This is why I think the development of this needs to include not just engineers but social scientists, ethicists, philosophers, and so on,” Pinchai said.

At the same time, he noted he was optimistic about artificial intelligence even though it was developing faster than previous technologies since there already were a “number of people who have started worrying about the implications.”

The TV report also featured an interview with James Manyika, Google’s senior vice president of technology and society, who said the company chatbot Bard might claim to have emotions but was nonetheless not sentient.

Pinchai and Manyika also admitted that the chatbot “tends to offer up nonexistent information.”

Thus, when Pelley asked Bard about inflation, the AI chatbot offered the titles of five books that did not exist.

The Google chief himself said Bard could sometimes “hallucinate.”

He said software engineers sometimes “don’t fully understand” why or how chatbots come up with certain answers, a “black box” in their governing.

“You don’t fully understand how it works, and yet you’ve turned it loose on society?” Pelly asked.

“Let me put it this way. I don’t think we fully understand how a human mind works, either,” Pinchai responded.