Google CEO Sundar Pichai warns of dangers of A.I. and calls for more regulation

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has warned about the dangers of unchecked A.I. in an op-ed in the Financial Times, and has said he believes that the area should be more tightly regulated. “We need to be clear-eyed about what could go wrong,” with A.I., he wrote, citing concerns such as the rise of deepfakes and potential abuses of facial recognition technology.

Pichai talked about the positive developments that A.I. can bring, such as recent work by Google which has found that A.I. can detect breast cancer more accurately than doctors, or Google’s project to use A.I. to more accurately predict rainfall in local areas. However, he also warned that “history is full of examples of how technology’s virtues aren’t guaranteed” and that “[t]he internet made it possible to connect with anyone and get information from anywhere, but also easier for misinformation to spread.”