Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt believes that extremely powerful artificial intelligence systems in the future will be strictly protected by governments. He talked about this in an interview with Noema.
"I suspect that ultimately both in the US and in China there will be a small number of extremely powerful computers with the ability to make autonomous inventions that exceed what we want to provide either to our citizens without permission or to our competitors. ... They will be placed on a military base that will operate from some nuclear energy source and surrounded by barbed wire and machine guns," Schmidt says.
Schmidt was Google's CEO and chairman from 2001 to 2011, before returning the reins of the company to co-founder Larry Page. After that, he held the position of executive chairman of the search giant and technical advisor before finally leaving the company in early 2020. Since then, 69-year-old Schmidt has been interested in AI and studying its impact on society. He co-authored a book called "The Age of AI" with the late diplomat Henry Kissinger and the dean of the computer science faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Daniel Huttenlocher. It details the risks and opportunities that AI will bring.
While this may seem far-fetched for now, Schmidt's forecast may come true, given how countries are already competing when it comes to maintaining leadership in the AI race. Recently, the US has tightened control over the export of its technologies to China, restricting the sale of AI chips made by companies like NVIDIA.
The same goes for China, which is working to minimize its dependence on American-made microchips. Chinese officials are forcing domestic tech giants, such as Alibaba and TikTok's parent company ByteDance, to purchase locally-produced AI chips.
Comments (0)
There are no comments for now