Q&A: Google executive talks about the AI arms race, monopolization and the Online News Act
Kent Walker joined top international security experts at Halifax conference
Kent Walker has a clear message about AI: The race is on between several countries to develop the technology, and the "only thing worse than being in an arms race is an arms race that you lose."
Walker, the president of global affairs at Google and Alphabet, its parent holding company, joined international officials and experts at the Halifax International Security Forum this weekend. He described artificial intelligence as a "breakthrough in the way we make breakthroughs."
On Friday, Walker sat down with Catherine Cullen, host of CBC's The House, to share his perspective on the global risks and rewards of AI technology, monopolization and Canada's Online News Act.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
On the future of AI, you have said there is so much focus on risk but not enough talk about the bigger risk of missing out on a technological revolution. What would missing out look like?
The changes we're seeing in artificial intelligence are not just about chatbots — not even just scientific breakthroughs. AI is a breakthrough in the way we make breakthroughs. So we're looking at potential revolutions in material science, in health care, in nuclear fusion, in clean water for people around the world. It's a remarkable time. It's a golden age for science right now, and that's the promise of AI.
AI, for instance, has military applications like unmanned submarines. It sounds like science fiction, but we are essentially talking about killer robots here. Adversaries like China are also developing these technologies. What do we need to be aware of in the face of what could be an AI arms race?
It's important to recognize that the race is on. We have seen significant progress on all sides in terms of these AI technologies.
The only thing worse than being in an arms race is being in an arms race that you lose. And so we want to make sure that not only are we protecting ourselves [and the] national security of democracies around the world, but we're also promoting our own advances in these areas so we stay in the lead in a variety of different technologies. That's critical.
Former Google employee Geoffrey Hinton has warned it's conceivable this kind of advanced intelligence could just take over from us and it would mean "the end of people." You are saying we have to move more quickly. Shouldn't such dire consequences mean we have to move with more caution?
I think we have to do both. At Google, we talk about being both bold and responsible, and we don't believe that those are in tension. We believe you can actually design with guardrails from the ground up. We do need to build in guardrails from a technical perspective, from a business perspective [and] from a policy perspective.
Any new technology obviously has potential risks, you know, but we've learned to work with electricity, which is an extraordinarily dangerous technology, and yet we harness it for good far more than the abuses.
I do want to turn now to the antitrust case. There was a U.S. court ruling that found your company had an illegal monopoly over search services. The U.S. Department of Justice is asking a judge to require you to sell off your browser, Google Chrome. You have said that's extreme. What other options are on the table rather than breaking Google into smaller pieces?
The judge's order itself recognized that much of Google's success comes from the innovation and the investment that we put into these tools over the years. And we want to maintain that and continue to make those tools better over the incoming years. So now the question — and we'll be proposing our own set of remedies later in December — will be how do you tie that to the specific issues that were at play in this case?
But you want to remain whole?
We think that we can do a better job for Canadians and people around the world when we have the synergies — the learnings and security and privacy and other areas — from across our products.
U.S. vice-president-elect J.D. Vance tweeted in February that "it's time to break Google up.... Monopolistic control of information in our society resides with an explicitly progressive technology company." Are you headed for a fight with this new administration?
We think there's never been more competition in the way people get information. AI just expands that playing field. So we work with administrations in the United States and around the world all the time. Our goal is to find a win-win where we want to honour the laws of democracies, but we also want to make sure that we're delivering value to our users. And so far we've navigated that and we hope to be able to continue to.
Bringing it back to Canada here — the Online News Act. Google has hammered out a deal with the federal government to pay $100 million to news organizations in this country. I should note it's something CBC will benefit from. But people still aren't getting news on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Would you call this legislation a success or failure?
We were pleased that we were able to work through a path with the government to come up with a workable interpretation of the legislation. The original legislation had challenges, and we were quite clear about that. We got to a process where we can continue to support Canadian news outlets as we have for many years. We are open to different ways of doing that.
We're in similar conversations in countries around the world. But we believe the search traffic from our search engine to news entities is actually one of the biggest forms of support that news agencies are getting around the world. We want to continue to be able to provide that traffic as well as partner with them as we all evolve into this new digital century.
If a future government were to scrap this law, would you keep that journalism fund?
We'd explore that as it comes to pass. What I can tell you is we continue to work with publishers in Canada because we do have a long-term interest in staying in Canada and investing in Canada. We want the news information ecosystem to be robust. That's why people go to the web. That's why people use Google Search on some level.
And so we feel both a business imperative and a social imperative to make sure that there are thriving publishers. There are lots of ways of doing that, and we're open to exploring all of them.
With files from CBC's Benjamin Lopez Steven