“QI want to be clear about this: there are biological, cybernetic and social dangers”, stressed Schmidt during a lecture in Miami.
Schmidt, who was CEO of Google between 2001 and 2011the year he took the helm of the board of directors until 2017, has been an advocate that AI will be beneficial to science and education, and to professionals in these and other fields, making them more “capable and productive” rather than to represent an occupational hazard.
“We need these humans, I want a human teacher, a human doctor and a human mayor”, stressed the founder of the philanthropic organization Schmidt Futures, guaranteeing that the percentage that this technology represents for the extinction of the human species “is zero”.
The co-author of the book “The Age of AI” (2021), alongside Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher, is not inclined to apply a pause in the advancement of this technology, but rather to seek solutions, together with governments, to address the “significant risks” this entails.
Eric Schmidt expressed concern, for example, that minors and teenagers could form an emotional bond with an AI device, and that it would tell them “something immoral, incorrect or inappropriate”.
“There’s a lot of evidence that social media is hurting teens, especially girls,” he warned.
Asked whether AI “is the nuclear weapon of the new generation”, Schmidt stressed that this will depend on the “proliferation” of these systems, which will eventually be faster than the human mind and even “will begin to learn about themselves”.
The former president of Google estimates that, in the future, there will be between five and ten “supercomputers” on the planet capable of processing human behavior, and about which it is not known how far they will be able to go.
Although these developments involve millions of dollars and knowledge, many of which are patents in the hands of the United States, he warns that China is investing more money than the North American nation and generating more technology in this field, and therefore welcomes the measures to make it difficult for the Asian semiconductor giant to take over.
“It looks like we’re a little bit ahead, a year or two, which isn’t much and they’re very determined to catch up,” said Schmidt, who during the Obama administration (2009-2017) was a member of the Advisory Board of US Science and Technology.
Although he risked that in a few “hundreds of years” AI will be “very similar to the human mind”, this executive does not believe, however, that it can “answer the question of what human consciousness is”.
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