AI, facial-recognition need global rules: Google CEO

Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai on Wednesday (January 22) urged regulators to build a global framework to manage AI and facial-recognition, warning that such technology could be used for nefarious purposes.

Speaking at an event at the World Economic Forum, Pichai said it was important to be clear-eyed about what could go wrong with AI, and while it promised huge benefits there were real concerns about potential negative consequences. Regulators are grappling with ways to govern AI, encouraging innovation while trying to curb potential misuse, as companies and law enforcement agencies increasingly adopt the technology.

The European Commission is taking a tougher line on artificial intelligence (AI) than the United States that would strengthen existing regulations on privacy and data rights, according to a proposal paper seen by Reuters.

Part of this includes a moratorium of up to five years on using facial recognition technology in public areas, to give the EU time to work out how to prevent abuses, the paper said. Pichai welcomed the European Commission’s proposal, saying it was a first step towards governments aligning their rules and agreeing on core values.

Google chief Sundar Pichai has called for ‘international alignment’ and ‘an agreement on core values’ in the future regulation of Artificial Intelligence. But positions of the EU and the US on the issue diverge, following the recent leak of European Commission papers detailing a crackdown on facial recognition technologies.

“The EU and the US are already starting to develop regulatory proposals. International alignment will be critical,” Pichai said on Monday (20 January), speaking to a packed audience at a Bruegel event in Brussels. “To get there, we need agreement on core values,” he said.

Last week, EURACTIV obtained a European Commission document setting out future plans that could see facial recognition technologies banned in public places for a period of between three to five years.Meanwhile, the US administration has urged European lawmakers to avoid heavy regulation frameworks in the future rollout of Artificial Intelligence technologies, saying the bloc should “avoid heavyhanded innovation-killing models” and adopt an approach similar to the US.

Although Pichai acknowledged that regulation in the field of AI is “important”, his stance was softer than the approach the EU is likely to take in the future.

“It’s important to build on existing regulations,” Pichai said, adding that the EU should first start by considering measures in the field of higher-risk applications in certain sectors, including healthcare.

He said that rather than impose any blanket regulation, the EU should consider approaching the clampdown on certain technologies on a ‘case-by-case’ basis, in the remit of public-private partnerships.

On the European side, the Commission is set to announce more concrete plans on 19 February, in terms of a more-tightly defined strategy on AI.

On facial recognition, Pichai stopped short of supporting the recently leaked Commission plans to impose a temporary ban on the technology but highlighted the fact that Google’s cloud service does not offer general-purpose facial recognition application programming interfaces (APIs), before addressing certain “important technology and policy questions”.

However, the company is still actively developing facial recognition software for private use, including its Face ID and Google Photos programmes.

Moreover, in October 2019, it announced the establishment of its ‘Celebrity Recognition‘ software, a tool that uses Google’s image and video libraries to store data on an “international roster of widely-known actors and athletes.”

Meanwhile, Pichai backed the notion that the EU should be able to do more with the vast quantities of industrial data it generates an idea recently floated by Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton.

In a recent interview with The

Financial Times, Breton said he would make sure the EU would “not miss the new wave of industrial data.”

“The most important thing is to evaluate how we create data, who will create the huge data lake some say data tsunami and how we will be able to use this data,” the French Commissioner said. The approach of potentially mirroring in the industrial sector the EU’s stance on protecting personal data was something that Pichai said Google could get behind. “As Europe develops its industrial data policy, I think it makes sense to support that, just as we’ve done on the consumer side,” Pichai said.

In an op-ed published in today’s Financial Times, Pichai makes a headlinegrabbing call for artificial intelligence to be regulated. But his pitch injects a suggestive undercurrent that puffs up the risk for humanity of not letting technologists get on with business as usual and apply AI at population-scale with the Google chief claiming: “AI has the potential to improve billions of lives, and the biggest risk may be failing to do so” thereby seeking to frame ‘no hard limits’ as actually the safest option for humanity.

Simultaneously the pitch downplays any negatives that might cloud the greater good that Pichai implies AI will unlock — presenting “potential negative consequences” as simply the inevitable and necessary price of technological progress.

It’s all about managing the level of risk, is the leading suggestion, rather than questioning outright whether the use of a hugely risk-laden technology such as facial recognition should actually be viable in a democratic society.

“Internal combustion engines allowed people to travel beyond their own areas but also caused more accidents,” Pichai writes, raiding history for a self-serving example while ignoring the vast climate costs of combustion engines (and the resulting threat now posed to the survival of countless species on Earth).

“The internet made it possible to connect with anyone and get information from anywhere, but also easier for misinformation to spread,” he goes on.