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Prominent computer scientist Andrew Ng says we need AI regulation to avoid 'toxic outcomes' and put the 'most evil, most exploitative companies' in check

andrew ng
Andrew Ng, the cofounder of Google Brain and the former chief scientist at Chinese tech giant Baidu. Dawn Endico/Flickr

  • Andrew Ng, formerly a top artificial-intelligence scientist at Google and Baidu, believes regulation is necessary for the industry to grow.
  • Regulation sets the rules for what we want and don't want AI to do, Ng said — which means companies can focus less on trying to optimize unwanted behaviors and more on what benefits society.
  • He said the online-advertising industry enables the "most evil, most exploitative" industries to use AI to spread misinformation that preys on their customers' fears and insecurities.
  • He believes regulation for AI could get everybody moving faster in the right direction.
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The shadow of regulation is looming over Silicon Valley as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the other giants buckle down for the government to impose new rules on the use — and misuse — of their technology.

One tech luminary, however, welcomes the storm: Andrew Ng, best known as the cofounder of Google Brain and the former chief scientist at Chinese tech giant Baidu, who believes regulating artificial intelligence will be an overall good thing for the industry.

If AI is regulated, "we'll see faster adoption," Ng told Business Insider in an interview earlier this month. "I think the right approach to government is not a hands-off approach."

Read more: One of the world's most famous computer scientists reveals his 'playbook' for bringing AI to every business

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Right now, Ng said, a lot of effort is being applied to solving problems in AI that we may not necessarily want solved. Once we know what we want and don't want AI to do for us, Ng said, the entire tech industry will be able to refocus its energies on more productive enterprises. (These days, Ng is the CEO of Landing AI, a consultancy to help large companies in every industry adopt AI.)

For instance, he said, in the financial sector, AI-powered, high-frequency trading software can have massive market impact, positive or negative, without human intervention. It falls to regulators to decide how much is too much, and what behaviors can have unanticipated consequences, he said.

"There are some outcomes in finance we don't want, and government should regulate that," Ng said. In general, he said, it's the role of government regulators to "eliminate toxic behaviors."

Ng said the same is true of other fields, like online advertising. "Some of the most successful businesses succeed by exploiting their users," incentivizing advertisers to place sensationalized ads that prey on users' fears and insecurities and drive them to click through, he said. Regulation could put these "most evil, most exploitative companies" in check, he said, and in turn put their considerable engineering talent to more beneficial use.

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While Ng didn't name names, both Google and Facebook — the leading online-advertising companies — have been widely criticized for their roles in spreading politically motivated misinformation to users via AI-powered web-search results or algorithmic feeds.

Even beyond guarding against bad outcomes, Ng is a fan of setting rules for AI: While he believes that most car companies have "completely unrealistic roadmaps" for when self-driving vehicles will be fully accessible to the masses, he thinks a major step in the right direction would be to regulate the technology — if only because then we can start talking about drawing up new rules of the road that take self-driving cars into account.

"Today's rules were written for human-driven cars," Ng said.

Ng also said he believes talk of an AI arms race between America and China is "overblown," whether or not regulations are put in place. In his opinion, China having a robust AI industry doesn't diminish America's, or vice versa.

On February 28, Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, joined 31 other media groups and filed a $2.3 billion suit against Google in Dutch court, alleging losses suffered due to the company's advertising practices.

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