What's going on at Google AI?

AI and ML systems have advanced in both sophistication and capability at a staggering rate in recent years. They can now model protein structures based only on the molecule's amino-acid sequence, create poetry and text on par with human writers -- even spot specific individuals in a crowd (assuming their complexion is sufficiently light). But for as impressive as these feats of computational prowess are, the field continues to struggle with a number of fundamental moral and ethical issues. A facial recognition system designed to identify terrorists can just as easily be leveraged to monitor peaceful protesters or suppress ethnic minorities, depending on how it is deployed. What's more, the development of AI to date has been largely concentrated in the hands of just a few large companies such as IBM, Google, Amazon and Facebook, as they're among the few with sufficient resources to pour into its development.