The shadow of regulation is looming over Silicon Valley as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the other giants buckle down for the government to impose new rules on the use — and misuse — of their technology.
One tech luminary, however, welcomes the storm: Andrew Ng, best known as the cofounder of Google Brain and the former chief scientist at Chinese tech giant Baidu, who believes regulating artificial intelligence will be an overall good thing for the industry.
If AI is regulated, “we’ll see faster adoption,” Ng told Business Insider in an interview earlier this month. “I think the right approach to government is not a hands-off approach.”
Right now, Ng said, a lot of effort is being applied to solving problems in AI that we may not necessarily want solved. Once we know what we want and don’t want AI to do for us, Ng said, the entire tech industry will be able to refocus its energies on more productive enterprises. (These days, Ng is the CEO of Landing AI, a consultancy to help large companies in every industry adopt AI.)
For instance, he said, in the financial sector, AI-powered, high-frequency trading software can have massive market impact, positive or negative, without human intervention. It falls to regulators to decide how much is too much, and what behaviors can have unanticipated consequences, he said.
“There are some outcomes in finance we don’t want, and government should regulate that,” Ng said. In general, he believes that it’s the role of government regulators to “eliminate toxic behaviors.”
Ng said the same is true of other fields, like online advertising. He said “some of the most successful businesses succeed by exploiting their users,” incentivizing advertisers to place sensationalized ads that prey on users’ fears and insecurities and drive them to click through. He says that regulation could put these “most evil, most exploitative companies” in check, and in turn, put their considerable engineering talent to more beneficial use.
While Ng didn’t name names, both Google and Facebook — the leading online advertising companies — have been widely criticized for their roles in spreading politically motivated misinformation to users via AI-powered web search results or algorithmic feeds.
Even beyond guarding against bad outcomes, Ng is a fan of setting rules for AI: While he believes that most car companies have “completely unrealistic roadmaps” for when self-driving vehicles will be fully accessible to the masses, he thinks that a major step in the right direction will be to regulate the technology — if only because then, we can start talking about drawing up new rules of the road that take self-driving cars into account.
“Today’s rules were written for human-driven cars,” Ng said.
Finally, and on a related note, Ng believes that talk of an AI arms race between America and China is “overblown,” whether or not regulations are put in place. To Ng’s mind, China having a robust AI industry doesn’t diminish America’s, or vice versa.
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