Ruth Porat on AI's Impact Across Industries

What's the excitement of working in technology in Silicon Valley? Is it even more exciting than working in finance, or not quite as exciting, but okay? It's hard to believe it's more exciting. Really? I mean, we're living in the most extraordinary time with AI. Bill Gates just said that. I completely agree. Engineers who've been at Google since inception are saying that this is the most exciting time in computer science in our lifetime, which always strikes me as profound, because Google's done okay. And what's extraordinary about it really goes to building on this decade of innovative work in AI, and so where are we now? What we're doing is we're addressing some of the most profound social challenges with AI in ways that are transformative. So to give you a couple of examples, I think that one of the extraordinary places for all of us, and we've heard a lot about it here over lunch, is health care. And part of the reason is it's the ability with AI to aggregate so much data that you can actually have a level of diagnosis that is better than what specialists can do. So one example, breast cancer. Back in 2015, Google had a breakthrough in detection, early detection of metastatic breast cancer. One in seven women will be diagnosed with breast cancer. I was one of those. I've had breast cancer twice. So when I heard about this, I did the only rational thing, I called my oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and I said, is this really as important as I hope? And he said, unequivocally, because only with AI can we democratize health care. It's the only way that oncologists everywhere, radiologists everywhere, all of the medical profession has the ability to leverage the insight that AI will give you through scans, reviewing a million scans. We're doing the same in other forms of cancer. We're doing it with something called diabetic retinopathy. Blindness caused through diabetes, which can be prevented if diagnosed early enough. And so I think that when you look at the impact of AI, this is what motivates our engineers. We're seeing in health care. We're seeing in education. We're seeing with food scarcity. You can improve crop yields by looking at test issues. Informant. We're looking at so many different ways that AI can make a difference on the most profound issues. One last one, because you asked, am I excited about it? Yes, it's better than even finance. Climate change, you know, SOS, or crisis alerts. Extraordinary. We've seen the impact of fires and flooding, 250 million people a year affected by flooding, but with AI, we can predict and are with seven days notice where the water flows will be to get people out of harm's way. So this is not science fiction. This is here today.