"I think that the conversation is distracting governments and society from the real ethical issues facing AI," Ng tells TIME. "And we shouldn't whitewash these issues by talking about things that could be hundreds of years away."

Highlights
* Andrew Ng (Baidu AI) thinks AI will have big impact on jobs
* Ng thinks 2017 will be year of the conversational computer
* Economist Hanson and other studies from McKinsey suggest the impact on jobs could be a lot less
* Attempts are made to compare the impact of AI to prior innovations (electricity, internet, combustion engine)
* If AI were going to displace 47% of jobs by 2035 then it needs to impact about ten times more than all driving jobs
* there should be a study and building stream of really huge successes and huge companies

* it seems like it would need to be ten times more than the dot.com boom

The Google Brain is the search giant's research arm working on machine learning, natural language understanding, and other technologies that power many of Google's products. Ng now oversees Baidu's growing Silicon Valley AI research lab.