I think that the most disastrous thing that I know of right now that is happening as a consequence of our technology is the destruction of our ecosystem, actually. There are other scenarios that we can hypothesize about in the future, but this is one that we know is happening ...

I’m not sure how far we are from that. I think that the situation is not necessarily as you see it, in the sense that, for example, an Android phone is an incredibly powerful computing device which, when you buy it, is yours. Anything, any software that you run on ...

The ability to recognize people from an image of their face and recognize a bunch of their characteristics, of the same kinds of characteristics that you or I would see when we look at a person’s face, is in itself a neutral technology.

I say that it’s neutral because it ...

I don’t think that technologies are neutral. There is a big debate in the US. It’s, of course, the only industrialized country that is having this debate about guns in which the people in favor of not having gun control say things like, "Guns are neutral pieces of technology, and ...

Now, if you had the goggles, and you were seeing this in your headset, this could be in 3D...

I find this utterly fascinating to watch. What you really are seeing...After the first few frames, it’s no longer about the original image in any way. It’s, if you like, just ...

Yes. Let me skip all of the expository material, and find something along those lines. This is just a fun picture that may actually come across in the camera. This is a picture of Rosenblatt, who was a very early pioneer in computer science, who actually did attempt to implement ...

Audrey, thank you so much for setting us up with a sub-optimal but functional situation, here.

I really only found out about the work that you are doing today, in our earlier conversation. I find it incredibly inspiring.

I think that, for me, what it really left is the sense ...

Thank you, Audrey.

I think that it was solving the ImageNet challenge. This happened several years ago. This was very closely related to the problem that I was just telling you about, deciding what is in the photo. ImageNet is a database of millions of photographs that have all been labeled by hand ...

Yes. The brute force approach is one that’s based on the idea of mathematical calculation in series and sequence. That model of computation allows you to do things like calculate the trajectory of an orbit to within 12 significant digits, things like this. These were the kinds of things that ...

In the beginning of computer science, the fathers of computer science, John von Neumann, Alan Turing, were very, very interested in brains and in thinking as well as in computation and mathematics. The origins of computational neuroscience and the study of neurons and the creation of computers, these origins were ...

Yes, it is. For example, one of the things that my group makes is the deep neural networks that look at photos and analyze what’s in them, and these algorithms are able to tag the contents of the photos.

This is a capability that is very, very new in computer ...

At Google, I work on machine intelligence. My group is part of a larger organization of more than 1,000 people called Research and Machine Intelligence.

A big part of the goal of that group as a whole is to advance the technologies that are essentially starting to confer capabilities that ...