Google’s AI Vision: Make Tech Human Again
Oshyan Greene about 1 year ago
While I share an interest in and some hope for a techno-utopian future, I am not sure that having Google lead it is particularly encouraging to me (a decade ago when "Don't be evil" was still a thing I might feel differently 😄). I have a hard time swallowing the vision of a remade Google barely a few years out from some of its biggest (and some still ongoing) blunders and "inhumane" choices. Killing well-loved and not terribly expensive (to Google) products is just one example of that. It was a year ago, less from some perspectives, that Google seemed deeply behind in the AI race, and I'm confident that wasn't just because of what they hadn't shown yet. They clearly accomplished great things in righting the ship on their AI research since then, but they were definitely caught by surprise by OpenAI and others for a while and were struggling to catch up. It's great that they're doing well now, but it will take some consistency of such execution and output for me to have faith they can sustain it.
The "human" element of the whole show is an interesting angle. I don't want to trivialize the feelings you and perhaps others had (including Hassabis on stage), those feelings are real and there is something truly significant going on that is worth having strong feelings about. The potential is tremendous. But the environment of a conference itself, that very social, in-person nature of it, and the excitement of all this wondrous new technology, all of that is a multiplier for such feelings. And a skilled company - and its leaders - can make you feel powerfully positive and hopeful in that moment, yet still be speaking on behalf of and leading a company that ultimately regresses to the Capitalistic baseline: exploit opportunities (humans are at the root of most/all of them), make money, maintain that by whatever legal and sometimes pseudo-legal means possible. How do we profit off of the human, the creative, the personal, and what are the downsides of that? I don't think we can be genuinely hopeful about a future led by any company without understanding the latter part of that question much more fully.
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