At a worldwide AI summit in Paris on Monday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai will declare that artificial intelligence (AI) is a “fundamental rewiring of technology” that will serve as an “accelerant of human ingenuity.”
“We’re still in the early days of the AI platform shift, and yet we know it will be the biggest of our lifetimes,” Pichai was supposed to say, according to AFP’s analysis of extracts from his address to world leaders and heads of the tech sector.
The head of Google will highlight upcoming uses of AI technology, like identifying the appearance of wildfires in satellite photos, and reveal a collaboration with the Institut Curie in the French capital to detect and treat cancer.
At an event held Sunday in Google’s Paris offices, Demis Hassabis, the head of the company’s DeepMind AI research lab, also praised the technology’s potential: “There is almost no area of science that won’t benefit from these AI tools,” the Nobel chemistry laureate said.
This month, Pichai announced that Google would invest $75 billion in capital projects this year, primarily in AI.
“With AI, we have the chance to democratise access (to a new technology) from the start, and to ensure that the digital divide doesn’t become an AI divide,” he was scheduled to say on Tuesday.
The “digital divide” is the term used to describe the difference in familiarity and ease of access to the internet and contemporary communications technologies between generations.
“Every generation worries that the new technology will change the lives of the next generation for the worse — and yet it’s almost always the opposite,” the text read.
In an attempt to downplay current concerns about the effects of AI, he will maintain that “We must not allow our prejudice for the present to impede the future.” The opportunity to use AI to enhance lives is once in a generation.
