DeepMind: 'Artificial intelligence is a tool that humans can control and direct'

Fears that artificial intelligence will wipe out human beings are completely overblown, according to the co-founder of Britain's DeepMind, who has insisted that the technology will help tackle some of the world's biggest problems including accessing clean water, financial inequality and stock market risks. Mustafa Suleyman, who with Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg set up the London-based machine learning company that was bought by Google in January 2014 for £400m, mounted a spirited defence of the company's successes. He told a conference on machine learning that "artificial intelligence, AI, has arrived. This isn't just some brief summer for this technology, and it's not about to go away again. High-profile figures including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates have all warned that the rise of AI poses a threat to humanity – a threat that has been echoed in recent Hollywood films such as Ex Machina, The Terminator and Transcendence. Yet Suleyman insisted that AI is, and will remain, a tool that humans can control and direct, rather than a threat. The best use for AI would be to help decisions about how to tackle some of the world's biggest problems such as lack of access to clean water, inequality of access to food and finance, and stock market risks, he suggested. DeepMind's systems use neural networks and "deep learning" methods that deploy low-level transistor networks to produce high-level effects so that they can, for instance, distinguish a cat's face from a human one – a trivial task for a human, but hard for a machine. That has been developed into "artificial general intelligence" (AGI) that can learn to solve tasks without prior programming, and have already been used to replace 60 hand-crafted systems across Google. The AGI system's deployment into speech recognition, now used in Android phones and Google Translate, had led to the biggest overall improvement in speech recognition in 20 years, Suleyman said, with a 30% reduction in transcription error rates. Yet training the program for the task took less than five days. Speaking to a conference on machine intelligence in London on Friday, Suleyman said that he was dismayed by the negative attitudes being shown towards AI. "It's sad how quickly we've adopted to the reality and don't acknowledge the magic and the good that these systems can bring.