In a recent editorial on Financial Times, Google CEO Sundar Pichai spoke about the regulation of artificial intelligence, highlighting the positive and negative potential of developing technologies.This perspective arrives just months after Google announced a corporate restructuring, which left co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin as board members and Sundar Pichai as the CEO of both Google and its parent company Alphabet.

In the article, Pichai opens with a discussion of technology’s potential to change lives, mentioning some of Alphabet’s efforts in using AI to develop advanced solutions in medical, ecological, and infrastructural fields.

But of course, the potential for great harm is also there, which is why Pichai highlights the “need to be clear-eyed about what could go wrong.” To that end, he makes a case for “sensible regulation” of AI-based technology from governments and corporations alike.

This sort of digital threat is no doubt an urgent issue, especially for companies like Google, whose products often rely on such tech. Pichai did not recommend any concrete guidelines or critique existing proposals, but he did mention important criteria to consider, such as “safety, explainability, fairness and accountability”.

Pichai’s words emphasize both the importance and urgency of regulatory decisions, but it also accounts for the huge task of considering the many relevant variables. To this end, he points to Google’s own public guidelines for accountable AI usage, as well as the company’s continued commitments to help “navigate these issues together”.