Welcome to this week’s edition of The Future in Five Questions. This week I spoke with Kent Walker, the president of global affairs and chief legal officer at Google’s parent company, Alphabet, amid a busy week for the company that included its ongoing legal battle with the Department of Justice and a presence at the United Nations General Assembly. (Listen to POLITICO Tech’s interview with Walker here.) Walker elucidated his bullish techno-optimism despite the company’s current legal challenges, dished on the heated race for supremacy in artificial intelligence, discussed the role of science in human progress, and shared his personal love of “Star Trek.” An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows: What’s one underrated big idea? The use of AI to promote scientific progress. There's been so much focus on AI chatbots that we risk missing the bigger picture. AI is revolutionizing the way we do scientific exploration, whether that's quantum computing, or material science, or agricultural productivity, or nuclear fusion, or drinkable water. Our team at DeepMind used AI to predict the shapes of 200 million proteins, nearly all the proteins known to science. Scientific progress lies at the heart of economic productivity, and increasing living standards, which has been a key challenge over the past couple of decades. What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? Many technologies are overhyped in their first year and underhyped over the course of a decade. In the 1980s, cell phones were clunky and expensive, and arguably overhyped, but now 90 percent of the planet is carrying a computer in their pocket. I was at Netscape in 2001 when we had the big tech crash, and there was a huge amount of hype at the time around connectivity. That led to the string of fiber around the world, which was called “dark fiber” for many years. People said we wildly over-invested in fiber, but it turned out that cheap, affordable, abundant fiber led to connectivity and investment in a new generation of technological improvement. It comes and goes. You never quite know in the moment what the future is going to hold. What book most shaped your conception of the future? I'll go with a TV series rather than a book: “Star Trek.” Growing up I loved science fiction, and it told optimistic stories about people exploring the universe and meeting new cultures, doing the best they could in uncertain environments, and doing so according to a set of principles and guidelines they were trying to implement. If you step back and look at the impact of technology over the last 100 years, the evidence is strongly “up and to the right,” meaning human lifespans have doubled around the world since the beginning of the 20th century. In the last 20 years, we've had more than a billion people around the world coming out of extreme poverty, which is unprecedented in the history of mankind. We sometimes focus on the immediate problems at home but forget about the overall impact of technology around the world, and I think that's a pretty powerful case. That's not to say we always get it right. We need governance, we need a rudder to make sure we're going in the right direction. But if you look at the overall impacts of the tools people have built, they've been overwhelmingly positive. What could government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? There are tech utopians and there are tech pessimists. You get what's called the “AI half-pipe of heaven and hell,” “it’s wonderful,” “no, it’s terrible,” but it’s much harder to tell the story that says AI has incredible promise and potential but we have to deal with it carefully. We need governments to have a balanced agenda that's not just about responsibility, not just about security, but also about opportunity and thinking about how we deliver the benefits of these tools as widely as we can to people around the world. What has surprised you the most this year? The genuine interest and curiosity about AI from political leaders around the world. People want to understand AI; they want to understand how we're mitigating risks and realizing its promise. People have been using AI for a dozen years if they've been using search, or Google Translate, or Google Maps, but the latest advances have put it more front and center. The conversations that have resulted have been generally constructive. Sen. Chuck Schumer’s AI Insight Forum was a remarkable moment, we had most members of the Senate and leaders from the private sector coming together in a spirit of listening and learning from each other. We want to build on that and ultimately forge an international consensus around the rules of the road.
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