: Artificial Intelligence is more profound than fire, electricity, or the internet, says Google boss
Print/DownloadArtificial intelligence (AI ) and quantum computing will revolutionize our world over the next quarter-century predicted Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google’s owner Alphabet, in an interview.
The boss of the tech giant said AI, which is when machines are programmed to simulate the human mind and solve problems, will have a bigger impact than most of the major breakthroughs in recent history.
“I expect it to play a foundation role pretty much across every aspect of our lives,” he said, in a podcast recorded by BBC media editor Amol Rajan. “The progress in artificial intelligence is still in early stages but I view it as the most profound technology humanity will ever work on and we need to make sure we harness it to societies benefit.”
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He said he expects it to play a foundation role in every aspect of our lives from healthcare and education to how we manufacture things and consume information.
“I view it as a very profound enabling technology,” said Pichai. “If you think about fire or electricity or the internet, it is like that but I think even more profound.
“Over time we will deal with much more intelligent systems. It can make humans more productive than we have ever imagined but we have to deal with all the changes that can come with it at that point, but luckily we are decades away.”
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Back in 2014 Google, before Alphabet was created, bought U.K. based DeepMind, an artificial intelligence startup founded by child chess prodigy Demis Hassabis.
With quantum computing Pichai said it can take on many more possibilities: “Now you can capture the complexity because you can keep track of many more states.”
Classical computers tend to think of the world in binary terms such as 0 and 1, or off and on, but in the real world things are less certain and they exist in between 0 and 1. Quantum computers are able to explore these different states in-between which opens up possibilities calculating things that were previously impossible.
