Google Tackles AI Principles: Is It Enough?

Google has released its manifesto of principles guiding its efforts in the artificial intelligence realm – though some say the salvo isn't as complete as it could be. AI is the new golden ring for developers, thanks to its potential to not just automate functions at scale but also to make contextual decisions, based on what it learns over time. This experiential aspect has the capacity to bring immense good to the proceedings of life, in the form of weeding out cyber-threats before they happen, offering smarter recommendations to consumers and improving algorithms, even tracking wildfire risk and monitoring the environments of endangered species – or, on the back-end, it can speed along manufacturing processes or evaluate open-source code for potential flaws. What we don't want, of course, is a Matrix-y, Skynet-y, self-aware network interested in, say, enslaving humans. Google is looking to thread this needle with its latest weigh-in on the AI front, its principles for guiding AI development.