Eric Schmidt on the Stakes of AI Technology

George Stephanopoulos interviews former Google CEO Eric Schmidt about Artificial Intelligence on “This Week” on December 15, 2024.

Transcript: George Stephanopoulos: I'm joined now by the former chairman and CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt. He's the author of a new book called Genesis, coauthored with Craig Mundy of Microsoft, The late Henry Kissinger, artificial Hope and the Human Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit. Thank you for coming in.

Eric Schmidt: Thank you.

George Stephanopoulos: Today, you know, you lay out the stakes of AI in pretty stark terms. I want to read it right here. The advent of artificial intelligence is a question of human survival. Explain.

Eric Schmidt: We need to take advantage, and this is what the book is about, incredible power of the arrival of AI and a new kind of intelligence, while preserving human dignity and values. It's going to be hugely hard. It's going to be very, very difficult to maintain that balance.

George Stephanopoulos: Why is it so difficult?

Eric Schmidt: Because the systems move so quickly. Look at what social media has done in terms of the overall zeitgeisty in our country and around the world, and now imagine a much more intelligent, much more, much stronger way of sending messages, inventing things. The rate of innovation, drug discovery and all of that, plus all sorts of bad things like weapons and cyber attacks and things like that, it's happening very, very fast.

George Stephanopoulos: You have a sentence that sounds innocuous but actually isn't. Machines with the ability to define their own objectives are not far away.

Eric Schmidt: We're soon going to be able to have computers running on their own, deciding what they want to do in the way that happens is it's a series of decisions we go from agents to then sort of go more powerful goals. And eventually you say to the computer, learn everything and do everything. And that's a dangerous point when the system can self improve. We need to seriously think about unplugging it.

George Stephanopoulos: But wouldn't that sense that kind of system have the ability to count our efforts to unplug it?

Eric Schmidt: Well, in theory, we better have somebody with the hand on the plug and metaphorically. But the important thing is that the power of this intelligence, the ability for this kind of new intelligence, means that each and every person is going to have the equivalent of a polymath in their pocket, in addition to your show and all your notes and writers. You're going to have an Einstein and a Leonardo da Vinci to give you advice on your show. That will be true for everyone on the planet. We just don't know what it means to give that kind of power to every individual.

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