Google Chairman Thinks AI Can Help Solve World's ‘Hard Problems’
Google Chairman Thinks AI Can Help Solve World's ‘Hard
Problems’
By Jack Clark January 11, 2016 — 8:50 AM PST
Google’s chairman thinks artificial intelligence will let
scientists solve some of the world’s "hard problems," like population
growth, climate change, human development, and education.
Rapid development in the field of AI means the technology
can help scientists understand the links between cause and effect by sifting
through vast quantities of information, said Eric Schmidt, executive chairman
of Alphabet Inc., the holding company that owns Google.
“AI will play this role to navigate through this and help
us.”
It can also aid companies in designing new, personalized
systems. In the future, Schmidt would like to see “Eric and Not-Eric,” he said
at a conference in New York, where “Eric” is the flesh-and-blood Schmidt
and“not-Eric is this digital thing that helps me.”
Hot Field
Google has been one of the most significant corporate
backers of AI. It uses the technology for new businesses, like self-driving
cars, and to improve existing ones, such as the Android phone operating system
or Google’s search engine. But competition is heating up as Facebook Inc.,
Microsoft Corp, International Business Machines Corp., Baidu Inc. and others
are also plowing resources into research for the technology.
“The power of AI technology is it can solve problems that
scale to the whole planet,” Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology
officer, said at the event.
AI is becoming so influential and important that
companies should work together to create standardized approaches, said Schmidt,
using similar tools and publishing their research to the academic community.
‘Profound Promise’
“Every single advance has occurred because smart people
got in a room and eventually they standardized approaches” he said. “The
promise of this is so profound that we -- Alphabet, Google, whatever our name
is at the moment -- are working incredibly hard to advance these platforms.”
Mountain View, California-based Alphabet employs hundreds
of people that conduct fundamental research into AI, sponsors numerous academic
conferences and publishes its findings throughout the year. In 2014 it acquired U.K.-based startup
DeepMind, which is trying to build machines that can think for themselves.
DeepMind now employs more than 150 researchers.
The field of AI feels like the early days of the PC and
mobile phone industries, Schmidt said.
There is “a small set of people that understand
collectively that when we put all this stuff together we can build platforms
that can change the world," he said.
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