Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said society will need to adapt to the new capabilities of AI, and “every product of every company” will be impacted by the technology.
Pichai talked at length about the impact of AI in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes this weekend. He said jobs would be disrupted including “writers, accountants, architects and, ironically, even software engineers.”
“For example, you could be a radiologist, if you think about five to ten 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,’” he added.
Google launched its AI chatbot Bard to the public last month, following the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, technology which has been incorporated into Microsoft’s search engine Bing.
But experts have warned that AI is already moving too fast and progress needs to be curbed. In March, a group of academics, joined by Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, called for an immediate pause in the types of training “experiments” that were more powerful than GPT-4, the latest iteration of OpenAI’s technology. Over 25,000 people have signed the letter.
Pichai said it is “not for a company to decide” how to regulate AI and said society must adapt quickly with laws to punish abuse of the technology and treaties among nations to ensure AI is developed and used safely. “This is why I think the development of this needs to include not just engineers but social scientists, ethicists, philosophers, and so on.” he said.
When asked if society was ready for AI technology like Bard and ChatGPT, Pichai replied: “On one hand, I feel no, because the pace at which we can think and adapt as societal institutions, compared to the pace at which the technology is evolving, there seems to be a mismatch.”