
Sundar Pichai Calls for AI Regulation - datashrimp
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51178198
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macinjosh
Alternate headline: "Sundar Pichai wants to cement his AI marketshare and
squash innovative startups"

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notatoad
My cynical take is that he wants to avoid taking any moral responsibity for
his ai. As long as there's regulations, they can fall back to a "we followed
the rules" defense and morality falls on the regulators.

Without regulation, they have to defend their actions by arguing that they do
is morally justified.

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fellellor
Someone smart, once said, "Watch what they do, and not what they say".

Unless google is actually spending serious money lobbying for laws that impose
any restriction, this is just bland obligatory public speech, that the culture
demands.

~~~
thundergolfer
A similar sentiment is “don’t tell me what you care about, show me your
financials and I’ll tell you what you care about”.

Also, I think you meant to say “spending serious money lobbying against
laws...”

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morninglight
Sundar Pichai's call for regulating artificial intelligence is a slap in the
face to anyone working in the field of AI. There are obvious existential risks
that he seems happy to skip over. His choice of AI is pure marketing driven
FUD, mixed with a healthy dose of self promotion.

Don't wait for him to put up any cash to reign in Nuclear weapons, Global
pandemic, Carbon emissions, Bioterrorism etc. Pichai will dismount this
soapbox as soon as a new buzzword hits Twitter.
[https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/)

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smiljo
And then a different take: [https://thenextweb.com/artificial-
intelligence/2020/01/20/su...](https://thenextweb.com/artificial-
intelligence/2020/01/20/sundar-pichai-offers-a-cryptic-warning-against-over-
regulating-ai/)

~~~
jchw
In fairness, at least there is some consistency, whether you interpret it to
be genuine or not:

> Now there is no question in my mind that artificial intelligence needs to be
> regulated. It is too important not to.

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tempsy
How can we seriously begin to regulate anything tech related until we actually
have people who have worked in tech or understand tech in government roles in
some capacity, either consulting or full time ?

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clay_the_ripper
This is why the people that regulate things often come from industry. You’ll
see a lot of (not entirely misguided) complaining about the fact that the
people that regulate finance, for example, often come from a major bank like
Goldman Sachs. While this can lead to questionable rules in some cases that
“favor the banks” at least someone that understands the industry is regulating
the industry.

I’d rather that than have some idiot who knows nothing write the rules and
screw everything up.

~~~
lowdose
Mario Draghi also had a career at Goldman before he ran the ECB. Goldman is
not called a vampire octopus squid for nothing. We have especially seen in
banking what regulation from the industry boils down to.

There is no need to be an industry expert to become a regulator, it is on the
regulated to explain the context as simple as possible.

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jshaqaw
Seems perhaps like a shiny distraction from calls for economic regulation or
privacy regulation.

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kerng
OpenAI? Maybe Google should join/sponsor them?

~~~
lowdose
With Microsoft? Would that signal AWS superiority in the cloud war?

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Barrin92
The thread is already filled with the usual "CEOs only call for regulation
when they're ahead" posts.

I find this to be such a shallow generic libertarian take on tech. Not only
does this always seem to come from people who eat up everything tech
executives say _on every other topic except regulation_ , it also totally
treats Pichai's arguments in bad faith.

Here's another take. Pichai is just a smart guy who is genuinely worried about
the abuse of the technology because there is indeed a lot of state actors or
other potential to abuse the technology in privacy damaging ways. If you want
to scare Google with regulation try anti-trust, not AI and privacy security.

Nobody is competing with Google or the large players on AI anyway, regulation
or not. Their advantage is in data, scale and talent. If anything higher
privacy standards might create ecosystems of privacy focussed companies in the
space.

~~~
_bxg1
I'm someone who generally thinks we need much more tolerance for regulation in
the States, and even I'm not buying Pichai's stance.

CEOs of publicly-traded corporations do _not_ act in good faith towards anyone
but shareholders. We can debate whether or not they're morally obligated to (I
would say yes), but realistically, they do not.

The _only_ reason a hired CEO would push for regulation of his own industry
besides wanting to stifle competition, would be if current (or upcoming)
regulation was unpredictable and he wanted to reduce risk by getting a clear-
cut answer. You _maybe_ could make that argument around something like privacy
where there's a mounting wave of public pressure. But at least right now, AI
is in no such situation.

~~~
Barrin92
Google probably loses out a good amount of bucks due to their stances on
defence work. I don't see how this can be attributed to some sort of cynical
corporate play, it's simply company culture.

Likewise, I don't see how a lot of these companies calling for facial
recognition bans can be considered to be in their interest. When the
government looks for large infrastructure those companies are the only real
players. Remove all regulation, and the government still not hand their data
to some sort of garage startup.

CEOs of large companies are totally able to act in good faith towards people
other than their shareholders. Of course, often they do not, but they
certainly can.

The arguments around caution and privacy of citizens are sound and reasonable.
Everyone can make them. There is no reason to not listen to Pichai just
because he runs a business.

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rogerkirkness
AI intrinsic socialist nature is showing in comments like these. It's so weird
to hear companies ask for regulation while the government is saying don't
worry about it. Either Google knows something mainstream AI research doesn't
or it's some kind of weird deferential posturing about competencies.

~~~
stevehawk
Companies tend to only want regulation when they need to block out competitors
by raising the bar to compete. Maybe they're worried about stealth startups
that may already be ahead of them?

~~~
tyre
They also tend to ask for regulation when they see stirrings that regulation
is on the horizon. Better to shape it then have it forced upon you.

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fierarul
Sure he does. They actually want global regulation so they don't have to worry
about pesky little things like national entities regulating their stuff and
perhaps fining them some billions down the road.

If only there was a global government to lobby to it would make things so much
easier legally speaking. /s

Regulation is also great to kill would-be competitors. Classic pull the ladder
move.

The government should start _taxing_ data. Just like any asset data should be
listed in their financial statement per type and quantity and taxed. Derived
models taxed based on the input data.

~~~
avocado4
Case in point - recent onslaught of regulation in the EU, including GDPR, was
meant to push Google out of the market but their market share only increased,
with valuation hitting record yet again just now.

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thelittleone
Is it a case of either us regulating AI or AI ultimately regulating us? It
would be tricky to implement such regulation, it would need to be a global
effort like nuclear non-proliferation. Otherwise certain nations might pursue
unregulated AI in hopes of some advantage to the detriment of all.

What times we live in.

EDIT: updated text to clarify position of curiosity.

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smadge
There already is an autonomous closed loop from human behavior, digital
surveillance of that behavior, and AI models that train on that data and use
their models to influence human behavior.

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thelittleone
I have limited knowledge in this area, but would AI not at some point behave
in a way like virus or bacteria and propagate and adapt in some ways until
it’s free (even if unintentionally) of those limitations.

