Google boss: AI is ‘biggest shift of our lifetimes’

PARIS, Feb 11 — Artificial intelligence (AI) is a “fundamental rewiring of technology” that will act as an “accelerant of human ingenuity”, Google boss Sundar Pichai will say at a global AI summit in Paris.

“We’re still in the early days of the AI platform shift, and yet we know it will be the biggest of our lifetimes,” Pichai was to say according to excerpts from his speech to global leaders and tech industry chiefs seen by AFP.

The Google boss will highlight imminent applications for AI technology such as detecting the emergence of wildfires in satellite images, as well as announce a partnership for detecting and treating cancer with the French capital’s Institut Curie.

Demis Hassabis, the head of Google’s DeepMind AI research lab, also hailed the technology’s potential at an event on Sunday in Google’s Paris offices.

“Material science, mathematics, fusion, there is almost no area of science that won’t benefit from these AI tools,” the Nobel chemistry laureate said.

Pichai said this month that Google would plough $75 billion into capital investments this year, mostly in AI.

“With AI, we have the chance to democratise access (to a new technology) from the start, and to ensure that the digital divide doesn’t become an AI divide,” he was to say Tuesday.

The concept of a “digital divide” refers to the gap between people with or without easy access to and familiarity with the internet and modern communications technologies.

“Every generation worries that the new technology will change the lives of the next generation for the worse—and yet it’s almost always the opposite,” Pichai’s text read.

Playing down today’s fears about the impact of AI, he will insist that “We must not let our own bias for the present get in the way of the future. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve lives at the scale of AI.” — AFP