How to Benefit Society with the Most Impactful Technology Developed Today
As the COO of one of the world’s leading AI labs, I spend a lot of time thinking about how our technologies impact people’s lives—and how we can ensure that our efforts deliver positive results. This is a central focus of my work, and a key message I convey when I meet with world leaders and key figures in our industry. For example, he was at the forefront of a panel discussion on “Equality Through Technology” that I led this week at World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Inspired by the significant conversations taking place in Davos about building a greener, fairer, and better world, I wanted to share some thoughts on my own journey as a technology leader, as well as some insights into how we at DeepMind approach the challenge of building technology that truly benefits the global community.
In 2000, I took a leave of absence from my job at Intel to visit the orphanage in Lebanon where my father grew up. I worked for two months to install 20 computers in the orphanage’s first computer lab and train students and teachers to apply them. The trip began as a way to pay tribute to my father. But being in a place with such narrow technology infrastructure also gave me a modern perspective on my own work. I realized that without a real effort from the technology community, many of the products I was building at Intel would be inaccessible to millions of people. I became acutely aware of how this access gap deepened inequality; even as computers solved problems and accelerated progress in some parts of the world, others were left even further behind.
After that first trip to Lebanon, I began to reassess my career priorities. I had always wanted to be a part of creating groundbreaking technology. But when I returned to the United States, my focus was on helping to create technology that could have a positive and lasting impact on society. This led me to various roles at the intersection of education and technology, including co-founding Team4Techa non-profit organization that aims to improve access to technology for students in developing countries.
When I joined DeepMind as COO in 2018, I did so largely because I could tell that the founders and the team shared a common focus on positive social impact. In fact, at DeepMind we now champion a term that perfectly captures my own values and hopes for integrating technology into people’s daily lives: Pioneering in a responsible way.
I believe that responsible pioneering should be a priority for anyone working in tech. But I also recognize that this is especially significant for powerful, pervasive technologies like AI. AI is arguably the most impactful technology being developed today. It has the potential to benefit humanity in countless ways—from combating climate change to preventing and curing disease. But it’s significant that we consider both its positive and negative downstream effects. For example, we need to be careful and thoughtful in designing AI systems to avoid reinforcing human biases, such as in the context of hiring and law enforcement.
The good news is that if we continually challenge our own assumptions about how AI can and should be built and used, we can build this technology in a way that truly benefits everyone. This requires inviting discussion and debate, iterating as we learn, building social and technical safeguards, and seeking out different perspectives. At DeepMind, everything we do is driven by our company’s mission to solve intelligence problems to advance society and benefit humanity, and building a culture of responsible pioneering is crucial to making that mission a reality.
What does pioneering look like in practice? I think it starts with creating spaces for open, straightforward conversations about responsibility within the organization. One place we’ve done this at DeepMind is in our multidisciplinary leadership group, which advises on the potential risks and societal impact of our research.
Developing our ethical governance and formalizing this group was one of my first initiatives when I joined the company—and in a somewhat unconventional move, I didn’t give it a name or even a specific purpose until we had met a few times. I wanted us to focus on the operational and practical aspects of responsibility, starting with a space free from expectations where everyone could talk honestly about what it meant to them to pioneer responsible action. These conversations were crucial to establishing a shared vision and mutual trust—which allowed us to have more open discussions in the future.
Another element of responsible pioneering is the adoption Kaizen philosophy and approach. I came across the term kaizen in the 1990s, when I moved to Tokyo to work on DVD standards for Intel. It’s a Japanese word meaning “continuous improvement” – and in its simplest sense, the kaizen process is one in which miniature, incremental improvements, made continuously over time, lead to a more proficient and ideal system. But it’s the attitude behind the process that really counts. For kaizen to work, everyone who touches the system must be on the lookout for weaknesses and opportunities for improvement. That means everyone must have both the humility to admit that something may be broken and the optimism to believe that they can change it for the better.
During my time as COO at online learning company Coursera, we used a kaizen approach to optimizing the structure of our courses. When I joined Coursera in 2013, the platform had strict deadlines, and each course was offered only a few times a year. We quickly realized that this didn’t provide enough flexibility, so we moved to a completely on-demand, self-paced format. Enrollment went up, but completion rates dropped—it turns out that while too much structure is stressful and inconvenient, too little leads to demotivation. So we moved back to a format where course sessions start a few times a month, and learners work toward suggested weekly milestones. It took time and effort to get there, but continuous improvement eventually led to a solution that allowed people to get the most out of their learning experience.
In the example above, our kaizen approach was largely effective because we asked our learning community for feedback and listened to their concerns. This is another key part of responsible pioneering: recognizing that we don’t have all the answers and building relationships that allow us to continually leverage external input.
In DeepMind’s case, that sometimes means consulting with experts on issues like security, privacy, bioethics, and psychology. It can also mean reaching out to diverse communities of people who are directly impacted by our technology and inviting them to talk about what they want and need. And sometimes it just means listening to the people in our lives—regardless of their technical or scientific background—as they talk about their hopes for the future of AI.
Essentially, pioneering responsibly means prioritizing initiatives focused on ethics and social impact. A growing area of interest in our research at DeepMind is how we can make AI systems more equitable and inclusive. Over the past two years, we have published research on decolonial artificial intelligence, queer justice in ai, Mitigating Ethical and Social Risks in Artificial Intelligence Language Modelsand much more. At the same time, we are working to augment diversity in the AI field through our dedicated scholarship programsInternally, we recently started hosting Responsible AI Community sessions that bring together different teams and efforts working on security, ethics, and governance—and several hundred people signed up to get involved.
I am inspired by the enthusiasm for this work among our employees and deeply proud of all my colleagues at DeepMind who are putting social impact at the forefront. I believe that by ensuring that technology benefits those who need it most, we can make real progress on the challenges facing our society today. In this sense, responsible pioneering is a moral imperative – and I personally can’t imagine a better way forward.