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Google.org’s Jacquelline Fuller on AI, deep fakes and uses Google’s money for good



Every morning, Jacquelline Fuller wakes up at sunrise, wondering how to save the world. “I can’t help it, I get up with the dawn pretty much wherever I am,” says Fuller, 50, the President of Google.org, Google’s charitable philanthropy arm.

“I try to exercise, to get some fresh air — hiking, yoga — and come to work pretty early. Sometimes I’m the first person here, wandering around saying, ‘Hey, where is everybody?’” 

Each hour counts when your goal is to end poverty, fight inequality and stop climate change, which, in a nutshell, is Fuller’s brief. Google.org pumps more than $200 million of Google parent company Alphabet’s annual profits into non-profit organisations using technology to make the world a better place: $1.3 million has gone to an incubator using artificial intelligence and smartphones to track the spread of antibiotic-resistant superbugs; $1.7 million to a start-up using AI and satellite imagery to monitor carbon emissions of every power plant in the world; $1.3 million to a computer science department in Uganda seeking to forecast air pollution by strapping monitors to bikes.

Fuller, who is based in San Francisco, is the power broker behind Google’s good-cause division but, even with a $200 million magic wand, she can feel overwhelmed. “These goals can seem so ambitious, and these challenges so big,” she says, sitting in a glass meeting room at Google’s Soho office.

“I do cry pretty much weekly when I’m reading about some of the harms that are going on.” Has she cried today? “Oh, goodness, there’s that photo — I’m going to cry now — on the internet about the girl in Venezuela …” she says. It’s a picture of an emaciated two-year-old, her ribcage visible. “They’re already saying this is one of the worst humanitarian crises, and these tend to hit the most vulnerable populations of children the hardest.”

Her current European tour has taken in six weeks of tech conferences and altruistic causes (she’s been flying, yes, but says all Google employees have their carbon footprints offset by the company’s investment in renewable energy). 

In Paris, the Tech for Good conference focused on problems in Google’s own backyard. When the March terrorist attack at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, was livestreamed to internet platforms, internet giants such as Google and Facebook failed to stop the video of the murders being shared. “We need to be humble here, to say our responsibility is to make sure we’re doing everything we can do, and we need to listen. We need to engage — and we need to recognise we’re not going to solve this alone,” says Fuller.

Google recently hired 10,000 people tasked with removing harmful content on YouTube — but 98 per cent of the filter work is still done by algorithms. It’s provided AI research grants to UK fact-checking site Fullfact, helping it develop an automated service using machine learning. But it’s a Sisyphean struggle.

She fears that “deepfakes” —  “synthetic” videos created by AI where it appears that a celebrity or political leader is saying something inflammatory — “could lead to real chasms in society and misinformation”. Fuller doesn’t profess a political inclination but she does decry closed borders and walls, insisting that by investing in the structures of the web we can maintain “free and open platforms where people can learn, disagree, argue, and present their solution”. 

In the UK, Google.org has been working with film director Richard Curtis’s Project Everyone, putting pressure on world leaders to follow the UN’s Global Goals for Sustainable Development (zero hunger, climate action, education equality) and investing $3 million in them. 

Google Digital Garage, which is a partner of the Evening Standard’s Future London Skills project, is offering free digital training in Sunderland.

Fuller was recently in Paris for the “Tech for Good” summit (REUTERS)

How worried is she about AI being used for evil? As a Google vice-president, she’s “a non-technologist” on the company’s AI ethics committee; at Google.org, the Google AI Impact Challenge invests $25 million into social projects which use AI. “It’s interesting listening to Demis [Hassabis] from Google’s DeepMind speak about this”, she says. “He says you hear voices from two ends of the spectrum when it comes to thinking about AI and the potential for society: those who are super-optimistic and those who are very pessimistic, and he says he’s sort of a moderate view. I’m there as well.” 

She maintains that we have to be “cogniscent” of what “harms” AI could be used for, “whether it’s surveillance or weapons”. Google has just blocked Chinese phone company Huawei from using its Android software amid accusations of snooping by the US government. Surely Google.org’s philanthropy work in South-East Asia is going to be affected by America’s political relations with Huawei? “At Google.org, one of the ways we’re going to have a particular ability to make an impact is when we empower the people who are doing the best job of opening up creative dialogue.”   

Fuller is uniquely qualified to do the maths on saving the planet. She was a “globally minded” child whose father was a US diplomat: her family moved 17 times across military bases in Europe. “My father specialised in the Soviet Union so we spent time in Russia before the wall came down in the Eighties,” she says. In her twenties, she studied for a year at the Institute of Political Studies in Grenoble, which had one of the two “most advanced arms control simulations in the world”. But “when I thought about other issues challenging humanity — inclusion of women and goals, or poverty — I didn’t see the same level of participation.”

So she returned to California and changed her major to urban poverty and public policy. She volunteered in Watts, “at the time the poorest and most dangerous census tract in America”, then fell in love with and married John Fuller, a public school teacher there. She has two daughters, Hosanna, 25, and Sophie, 23, a sophomore engineer and a health researcher at UCS Technologies. “You know the stats in technology: we haven’t had many women traditionally,” says Fuller. “We’ve gone from 20 per cent to 26 cent women in leadership positions at Google. That’s a good sign but you’re part of only 26 per cent in the room.”

Her first email to a colleague on the day I meet her was at 5.26am, embedding a link to another article “on the growing anti-Semitism in Germany, a topic we have talked about as far as we’ve talked about online safety, and hate speech, and bullying.” Did he reply immediately? “He got up at a normal hour. My team knows you’ll get weird things from Jacquelline at weird times but because you get an email from me at a certain time doesn’t mean you have to respond.”

On her last working trip to Europe, the same colleague gave her a copy of Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. She says she goes to bed at 9pm, which is just as well. Tomorrow morning, she has to save the day.

 

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