April 18, 2023: Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai stated “every product of every firm” will be impacted by the rapid development of A.I., warning that society ought to prepare for technologies such as the ones it’s already launching.

In an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” is airing that struck a concerned tone, interviewer Scott Pelley tried many of Google’s artificial intelligence projects and stated that he was “speechless” and felt it was “unsettling,” which refers to the human-like capabilities of products like Google’s chatbot Bard.

“We need adapting as a society for it,” Pichai told Pelley, adding that jobs that A.I. would disrupt would include “knowledge workers,” including writers, accountants, and, ironically, even software engineers.

“This will impact every product across every company,” Pichai said. “For instance, you could be a radiologist; if you think about five to 10 years from now, you will have an A.I. collaborator. You come in the morning, let’s experience you have a hundred things to go from over, it may say, ‘these are the most cases you need to look at first.'”

Pelley viewed different areas with advanced A.I. products within Google, including DeepMind, where robots played soccer, which they studied themselves, as opposed to humans. Another unit is slowing robots that noted items on a countertop and fetched Pelley, he questioned.

When warning of A.I.’s consequences, Pichai stated that the scale of the problem of disinformation and unreal news and images will be “much significant,” which added that “it could cause harm.”

Last month, Pichai told employees that the success of its newly launched Bard program hinges on public testing, which added that “things will go wrong.”

Google established its A.I. chatbot Bard as an experimental product to the public in the previous month. It is following Microsoft’s January announcement that its inquiries engine Bing would state that OpenAI’s GPT technology garnering international attention after ChatGPT launched in 2022.

Therefore, fears of the consequences of the rapid progress have also reached the public and critics in the latest weeks. In March, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and dozens of academics are known for an immediate pause in training “experiments” connected to different language models that were “powerful than GPT-4,” OpenAI’s flagship LLM. Over 25,000 people have been signing the letter since then.

“Competitive pressure among giants such as Google and startups you’ve never attended of is propelling humanity into the future, ready or not,” Pelley is commenting in the segment.

Google is launching a document outlining “recommendations for regulating A.I. ” Still, Pichai said society must quickly adapt to regulation, laws to punish abuse and treaties among nations making A.I. safe for the world, and rules that “Align with human values including morality.”

“It’s not for a firm to decide,” Pichai stated. “This is why I think this development needs to include not engineers but social scientists, ethicists, philosophers and so on.”

When asked if society is prepared for A.I. technology like Bard, Pichai answered, “On one hand, I feel no, as the pace at which we can think adapting as societal institutions, in comparison to the pace at which the technology which evolves, there seems to be a mismatch.” 

However, he added that he’s optimistic compared to other technologies in the past, “the people who have begun worrying about the implications” did so early on.