AI can make an impact like electricity: Andrew Ng

Over the years, Andrew Ng has worn many hats — Coursera co-founder, former Baidu chief scientist, founding lead of Google Brain team, and Stanford University adjunct professor. But lately, he has emerged as the leading influencer championing artificial intelligence (AI). Well over 1.5 million people have enrolled in his AI courses in Coursera. In a chat with ET, Ng talks about recent AI controversies: Elon Musk Versus Mark Zuckerberg spat on dangers of AI, Facebook AI chatbots creating their own language and job displacements. Edited excerpts:
In an experiment recently, Facebook chatbots created their own language and had to be shut down. Isn’t that a dangerous sign that we are dealing with something we don’t fully understand yet?
In the early days, electricity was seen as dangerous. People did PR stunts to show electricity could electrocute an elephant. This kind of fear mongering is completely unnecessary. Ultimately, like electricity, AI will be beneficial to the human society. And electrocution of an elephant hardly ever happens today. One thing that AI can do is that a small team of AI engineers can do such work today which earlier even thousand engineers could not have done. The thing I worry about is that AI software will be in direct competition with a lot of people for jobs.

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg had a recent face-off over dangers of AI. Which side are you on?
I am more on Mark Zuckerberg’s side in that debate. I think that AI will lead to a low cost and better quality life for millions of people. Like electricity, it’s a possibility to build a wonderful society. Also right now, I don’t see a clear path for AI to surpass human-level intelligence.

How far are we from a true blue self-driving car?
Closer than what many people think.

How do you think is the Indian AI ecosystem emerging?
I think the Indian AI ecosystem is growing rapidly. A lot of Indian entrepreneurs reach out to me seeking feedback about startups and products. And some of them have very interesting business ideas. India has a large base of tech talent and I hope that a lot of AI machine learning education online will allow Indian software professionals to break into AI.

Do you believe that soon machine learning will come out of the preserve of technology, born-digital companies and researchers into traditional industries?
I have been making this analogy. Since last 100 years or so, electricity has transformed industry after industry. Take any sector, healthcare, logistics, transportation, retail, electricity has dramatically transformed how it operated and today we are in a surprisingly similar situation with AI. In future, AI will have a similar impact on industries. Information technology, web search, and advertising are already being powered by artificial intelligence. But to build an AI-powered society, it will require a lot of work from companies, tech experts, governments etc. to take it to stage where AI can make an impact like electricity ended up making.

How will machine learning change companies and how we manage them?
AI will transform all the large tech companies and I think it’s surprisingly straight path for other companies outside tech too. A lot of CEOs have a certain idea of how to use AI to change their business but they might just not have AI talent to do the work they need. The challenge is how to find the ten or hundred AI professionals they need. Ideally, they would like to train their own employees in AI skills and technology but it was difficult till now. Deep learning is one extreme example of a technology that has risen very rapidly and a lot of companies are looking for ways to train up their people.

More use of AI will lead to displacement of workers. How far are we from the first big wave of displacement due to AI?
Right now, AI is at a nascent stage. One of the features of AI is automation and that is completely transformative. And with the rise of AI tools, which have been invented in the last two years, several processes can now be automated. Clearly, there are a lot of opportunities for automation going forward. Soon we will have to rethink our educational system and also think about reskilling displaced people so that they are able to find meaningful work again.

Usually regulation has followed innovation but in an area like AI, which is not clearly understood currently, should regulation precede innovation?
One thing where we will need to think about is the job displacement part. Elon Musk is worried about AI apocalypse but I am worried about people losing their jobs. The society will have to adapt to a situation where people learn throughout their lives depending on the skills needed in the marketplace. And that’s possible today with rise of digital content, online learning courses, and a whole lot of other resources like books etc.