The Risks and Opportunities of an AI Future — with Eric Schmidt

25:19right isolated the computer is feeding you stuff it's not it's not optimized around human values good or bad god knows what it's trying to do it's trying to make money or something that's not a good answer so i think most reasonable people would say okay some sort of fossil fuels are a net good i would argue pesticides are a net good but we have emission standards and an fda most people would i I think loosely agree or mostly agree that some sort of regulation that keeps these things in check makes sense. Now, let's talk about big tech, which you were an instrumental player in. You guys figured out a way, quite frankly, to overrun Washington with lobbyists and avoid all reasonable regulation.

26:04Why are things going to be different now than what they were in your industry when you were involved in it? Well, President Trump has indicated that he is likely to repeal the executive order that came out of President Biden, which was an attempt at this. So I think a fair prediction is that for the next four years, there'll be very little regulation in this area as the president will be focused on other things. so what will happen in those companies is if there is real harm there's liability there's lawsuits and things so the companies are not completely scot-free our companies remember are economic agents and they have lawyers whose jobs are to protect their intellectual property and their goals so it's going to take i'm sorry to say it's likely to take some kind of a calamity to cause a change in regulation.

26:55And I remember when I was in California, when I was younger, California driver's licenses, the address on your driver's license was public. And there was a horrific crime where a woman was followed to her home and then she was murdered based on that information. And then they changed the law. And my reaction was, didn't you foresee this, right? You put millions and millions of license information to the public and you don't think that some idiot who's horrific is going to harm somebody? So my frustration is not that it will occur, because I'm sure it will, but why did we not anticipate that as an example?

27:32We should anticipate, make a list of the biggest harms. I'll give you another example. These systems should not be allowed access to weapons. Very simple. You don't want the AI deciding when to launch a missile. You want the human to be responsible. And these kinds of sensible regulations are not complicated to state. Are you familiar with character AI? I am. Really, just a horrific incident where a 14-year-old thinks he's established a relationship with an AI agent that he thinks is a character from Game of Thrones. He's obviously unwell, although my understanding is from his mother, who's taken this on as an issue, understandably, he did not qualify as someone who was mentally ill, establishes this very deep relationship with obviously a very nuanced character.

28:29And the net effect is he contemplates suicide and she invites him to do that. And the story does not end well. And my view, Eric, is that if we're waiting for people's critical thinking to show up or for the better angels of CEOs of companies that are there to make a profit. That's what they're supposed to do. They're doing their job. We're just going to have tragedy after tragedy after tragedy. My sense is someone needs to go to jail. And in order to do that, we need to pass laws showing that if you're reckless with technology and we can reverse engineer it to the death of a 14-year-old, that you are criminally liable.

29:07But I don't see that happening. So I would push back on the notion that people need to think more critically. That would be lovely. I don't see that happening. I have no evidence that any CEO of a tech company is going to do anything but increase the value of their shares, which I understand and is a key component of capitalism. It feels like we need laws that either remove this liability shield. I mean, does any of this change until someone shows up in an orange jumpsuit? I can tell you how we dealt with this at Google. We had a rule that in the morning we would look at things. And if there was something that looked like real harm, we would resolve it by noon.

29:47And we would make the necessary adjustments. The example that you gave is horrific, but it's all too common. And it's going to get worse for the following reason. So now imagine you have a two-year-old and you have the equivalent of a bear that is the two-year-old's best friend. And every year the bear gets smarter and the two-year-old gets smarter too, becomes three, four, five, and so forth. That now 15-year-old's best friend will not be a boy or girl of the same age. It'll be a digital device. And such people, highlighted in your terrible example, are highly suggestible. So either the people who are building the equivalent of that bear 10 years from now are going to be smart enough to never suggest harm, or they're going to get regulated and criminalized.

30:39Those are the choices. I used to say that the internet is really wonderful, but it's full of misinformation, and there's an off button for a reason, turn it off. I can't do that anymore. The internet is so intertwined in our daily lives, all of us, every one of us, for the good and bad, that we can't get out of the cesspool if we think it's a cesspool, and we can't make it better because it keeps coming at us. The industry, to answer your question, the industry is optimized to maximize your attention and monetize it. So that behavior is going to continue. The question is, how do you manage the extreme cases?

31:17Anything involving personal harm of the nature that you're describing will be regulated one way or the other. Yeah, at some point, it's just a damage reincurrent till then, right? We've had 40 congressional hearings on child safety and social media, and we've had zero laws. In fairness to that, there is a very, very extensive set of laws around child sexual abuse, which is obviously horrific as well. And those laws are universally implemented and well-adhered to. So we do have examples where everyone agrees what the harm is. I think all of us would agree that a suicide of a teenager is not okay.

31:59And so regulating the industry so it doesn't generate that message strikes me as a no-brainer. The ones which will be much harder are where the system has essentially captured the emotions of the person and is feeding them back to the person, as opposed to making suggestions. And we talk about this in the book. When the system is shaping your thinking, you are being shaped by a computer. You're not shaping it. And because these systems are so powerful, we worry, and again, we talk about this in the book, of the impact on the perception of truth and of society. Who am I? What do I do? And ultimately, one of the risks here, if we don't get this under control, is that we will be the dogs to the powerful AI, as opposed to us telling the AI what to do.

32:48A simple answer to the question of when is the industry believes that within five to ten years, these systems will be so powerful that they might be able to do self-learning. And this is a point where the system begins to have its own actions, its own volition. It's called general intelligence, AGI as it's called. And the arrival of AGI will need to be regulated. We'll be right back.

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34:37Turn those what-ifs into... Sign up for your$1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer. We know that social media and a lot of these platforms and apps and time on phone is just not a good idea. I'm curious what you think of my colleagues who are Jonathan Haidt, and that is, is there any reason for anyone under the age of 14 to have a smartphone? And is there any reason for anyone under the age of 16 to be on social media? Should we age-gate pornography, alcohol, the military? Shouldn't we, specifically the device makers and the operating systems, including your old firm, shouldn't they get in the business of age gating?

35:17They should. And indeed, Jonathan's work is incredible. He and I wrote an article together two years ago, which called for a number of things in the area of regulating social media. And we'd start with changing a law called COPA from 13 to 16. And we are quite convinced that using various techniques, we can determine the age of the person, with a little bit of work. And so people say, well, you can't implement it. Well, that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. And so we believe that at least the pernicious effects of this technology on below 16 can be addressed. When I think about all of this, to me, we want children to be able to grow up and grow up with humans as friends.

36:01And I'm sure with the power of AI arrival that you're going to see a lot of regulation about child content. what can a child below 16 see? This does not answer the question of what do you do with a 20-year-old, right, who is also still being shaped. And as we know, men develop a little bit later than women, and so let's focus on the underdeveloped man who's having trouble in college or what have you. What do we do with them? And that question remains open. In terms of the idea that the genie is out of the bottle here, and we face a very real issue or fulcrum retention, and that is we want to regulate it.

36:41We want to put in guardrails. At the same times, we want to let our, you know, our sprinters and our IP and our minds and our universities and our incredible for-profit machine, we want to let it run, right? And the fear is that if you regulate it too much, the Chinese or, you know, the Islamic Republic isn't quite as concerned and gets ahead of us on this technology. How do you balance that tension between So there are quite a few people in the industry, along with myself, who are working on this. And the general idea is relatively light regulation looking for the extreme cases. So the worst of the extreme events would be a biological attack, a cyber attack, something that harmed a lot of people, as opposed to a single individual, which is always a tragedy.

37:31Any misuse of these in war, any of those kinds of things we worry a lot about. And there's a lot of questions here. One of them is, do you think that if we had an AGI system that developed a way to kill all of the soldiers from the opposition in one day, that it would be used? And I think the answer from a military general perspective would be yes. The next question is, do you think that the North Koreans, for example, or the Chinese would obey the same rules about when to apply that? And the answer is no one believes that they would do it safely and carefully under the way the U.S. law would require.

38:12U.S. law has a law called person in the loop or meaningful human control that tries to keep these things from going out of hand. So what I actually think is that we don't have a theory of deterrence with these new tools. We don't know how to deal with the spread of them. And the simple example, and sorry for the diversion for a sec, but there's closed source and open source. Closed is like you can use it, but the software and the numbers are not available. There are other systems called open source where everything is published. China now has two of what appear to be the most powerful models ever made, and they're completely open.

38:56And obviously, you and I are not in China, and I don't know why China made a decision to release them, but surely evil groups and so forth will start to use those. Now, maybe they don't speak Chinese or what have you, or maybe the Chinese just discount the risk. But there's a real risk of proliferation of systems in the hands of terrorism. And proliferation is not going to occur by misusing Microsoft or Google or what have you. It's going to be by making their own servers in the dark web. And an example, a worry that we all have is exfiltration of the models. I'll give an example. Google or Microsoft or OpenAI spends$200 million or something to build one of these models.

39:36They're very powerful. And then some evil actor manages to exfiltrate it out of those companies and put it on the dark web. we have no theory of what to do when that occurs because we don't control the dark web we don't know how to detect it and so forth in the book we talk about this and say that eventually the network systems globally will have fairly sophisticated supervision systems that will watch for this because it's another example of proliferation it's analogous to the spread of enriched uranium if anyone tried to do that there's an awful lot of monitoring systems that would say, you have to stop right now or we're going to shoot you.

40:17So you make a really cogent argument for the kind of existential threat here, the weaponization of AI by bad actors. And we have faced similar issues before. My understanding is there are multilateral treaties around bioweapons or we have nuclear arms treaties. So is this the point in time where people such as yourself and our defense infrastructure should be thinking about or trying to figure out multilateral agreements. And again, the hard part there is my understanding is it's very hard to monitor things like this. And should we have something along the lines of Interpol that's basically policing this and then fighting fire with fire, using AI to go out and find scenarios where things look very ugly and move in with some sort of international force?

41:04It feels like a time for some sort of multinational cooperation is is upon us. Your thoughts? We agree with you. And in the book, we specifically talk about this in a historical context of the nuclear weapons regime, which Dr. Kissinger, as you know, invented largely. What's interesting is working with him, you realize how long it took for the full solution to occur. America used the bomb in 1945. Russia or Soviet Union demonstrated in 1949. So that's roughly, it was a four-year gap, and then there was sort of a real arms race. And once that, it took roughly 15 years for an agreement to come for limitations on these things, during which time we were busy making an enormous number of weapons, which ultimately were a mistake, including, you know, these enormous bombs that were unnecessary.

41:56And so things got out of hand. in our case, I think what you're saying is very important that we start now. And here's where I would start. I would start with a treaty that says we're not going to allow anyone who's a signatory of this treaty to have automatic weapon systems. And by automatic weapons, I don't mean automated. I mean ones that make the decision on their own. So an agreement that any use of AI of any kind in a conflict sense has to be owned and authorized by a human being who is authorized to make that decision. That would be a simple example. Another thing that you could do as part of that is say that you have a duty to inform when you're testing one of these systems in case it gets out of hand.

42:47Now, whether these treaties can be agreed to, I don't know. Remember that It was the horror of nuclear war that got people to the table, and it still took 15 years. I don't want us to go through an analogous bad incident involving an evil actor, North Korea. Again, I'm just using them as bad examples. Or even Russia today, we obviously don't trust. I don't want to run that experiment and have all that harm and then say, hey, we should have foreseen this. Well, my sense is when we are better at technology, we're not in a hurry for a multilateral treaty, right? When we're under the impression that our nuclear scientists are better than your, remember, our Nazis are smarter than your Nazis kind of thing, that we don't want a multilateral treaty because we see advantage.

43:33And curious if you agree with this, we have better AIs than anyone else. Does that get in the way of a treaty or should we be doing this from a position of strength? And also, if there's a number two, and maybe you think we're not the number one, but assuming you think that the U.S. is number one in this, who is the number two? Who do you think poses the biggest threat? Is it their technology or their intentions or both? If you were to hear that one of these really awful things took place, who would you think most likely are the most likely actors behind it? Is it a rogue state? Is it a terrorist group?

44:06Is it a nation state? First place, I think that the short-term threats are from rogue states and from terrorism. And because, as we know, there's plenty of groups that seek harm against the elites in any country. Today, the competitive environment is very clear that the U.S. with our partner, U.K., I'll give you an example. This week, there were two libraries from China that were released, open source. One is a problem solver that's very powerful, and another one is a large language model that's equal, and in some cases exceeds the one from Meta, which they use every day. It's called Llama 3 400 billion.

44:47I was shocked when I read this because I had assumed that in my conversation with the Chinese that they were two to three years late. It looks to me like it's within a year now. So it would be fair to say it's the U.S. and then China within a year's time. Everyone else is well behind. Now, I'm not suggesting that China will launch a rogue attack against an American city. But I am alleging that it's possible that a third party could steal from China, because it's open source, or from the U.S., if they're malevolent, and do that. So the threat escalation matrix goes up with every improvement. Now today, the primary use of these tools is to sow misinformation, which is what you talked about.

45:37But remember that there's a transition to agents. And the agents do things. So it's a travel agent or it's, you know, whatever. And the agents speak English. You give them English and they result, they respond in English. So you can catenate them. You can literally put agent one talks to agent two talks to agent three talks to agent four. And there's a scheduler that makes them all work together. And so, for example, you could say to these agents, design me the most beautiful building in the world. go ahead and file all the permits, negotiate the fees of the builders, and tell me how much it's going to cost, and tell my accountant that I need that amount of money.

46:19That's the command. So think about that. Think about the agency, the ability to put an integrated solution that today takes 100 people who are very talented, and you can do it by one command. So that acceleration of power could also be misused. I'll give you another example. You were talking earlier about the impact on social media. I saw a demonstration in England, in fact. The first command was build a profile of a woman who's 25, she has two kids, and she has the following strange beliefs. And the system wrote the code and created a fake persona that existed on that particular social media case.

47:03Then the next command was take that person and modify that person to every possible stereotype, every race, sex, so forth and so on, age, demographic thing, with similar views and populate that. And 10 ,000 people popped up just like that. So if you wanted, for example, today, this is true today, if you wanted to create a community of 10 ,000 fake influencers to say, for example, that smoking doesn't cause cancer, which as we know is not true, you could do it. And one person with a PC can do this. Imagine when the AIs are far, far more powerful than they are today. So one of the things that Dr.

47:44Kissinger was known for, and quite frankly, I appreciate was this notion of real politic. Obviously, we have aspirations around the way the world should be. But as it relates to decision making, we're also going to be very cognizant of the way the world is and makes him, I mean, he's credited with a lot of very controversial slash difficult decisions, depending on how you look at it. What I'm hearing you say leads, all these roads lead to one place in my kind of quote unquote critical thinking or lack thereof brain. And that is there's a lot of incentive to kiss and make up with China and partner around this stuff, that if China and the U.S.

48:23came to an agreement around what they were going to do or not do and bilaterally created a security force and agreed not to sponsor proxy agents against the West or each other, that we'd have a lot, that would be a lot of progress. That might be 50, 60, 80 percent of the whole shooting match is if the two of us could say, we're going to figure out a way to trust each other on this issue and we're going to fight the bad guys together on this stuff. Your thoughts? So Dr. Kissinger, of course, was the world's expert in China. He opened up China, which is one of his greatest achievements. But he was also a proud American.

49:01And he understood that China could go one way or the other. His view on China was that China, and he wrote a whole book on this, was that China wanted to be the Middle Kingdom as part of their history, where they sort of dominated all the other countries. But it's not like America. His view was they wanted to make sure the other countries would show fealty to China, in other words, do what they wanted. And occasionally, if they didn't do something, China would then extract some payment, such as invading the country. That's roughly what Henry would say. So he was very much a realist about China as well.

49:40His view would be at odds today with Trump's view and the U.S. government's. The U.S. government is completely organized today around decoupling, that is literally separating. And his view, which I can report accurately because I went to China with him, was that we're never going to be great friends, but we have to learn how to coexist. That means detailed discussions on every issue at great length to make sure that we don't alarm each other or frighten each other. His further concern was not that President Xi would wake up tomorrow and invade Taiwan, but that you would start with an accident and then there would be an escalatory ladder.

50:28And that because the emotions on both sides, you'd end up just like in World War I, which started with a shooting in Sarajevo, that ultimately people found in a few months that they were in a world war that they did not want and did not expect. And once you're in the war, you have to fight. So the concern with China would be roughly that we are codependent and we're not best friends. Being dependent is probably better than being completely independent. that is non-dependent because it forces some level of understanding and communication. Eric Schmidt is a technologist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist.

51:10In 2021, he founded the Special Competitive Studies Project, a nonprofit initiative to strengthen America's long-term competitiveness in AI and technology more broadly. Before that, Eric served as Google's chief executive officer and chairman, and later as executive chairman and technical advisor. He In addition to your intelligence, I get the sense your heart's in the right place and you're using your human and financial capital to try and make the world a better place. Really appreciate you and your work.

51:50Algebra of Happiness. I'm at this gathering called Summit, and I've been struck by how many people are successful, or at least the appearance of being successful, as far as I know they're rich kids, but they do seem to be, I don't know, economically secure or overeducated, interesting. Some of them started and sold businesses, but what I see is a lot of people searching. And they'll say shit like, well, I'm just taking a year to really focus on improving my sleep. Okay, no. Sleep is supposed to be part of your arsenal. It's not why you're fighting this war. You need good sleep, but I don't think you should take a year to focus on it.

52:26Anyways, does that sound boomer of me? But this notion of finding a purpose, and what I have found is, and this is probably one of the accoutrements of a prosperous society, is ask yourself, do you have the wrong amount of money? Do you have just the wrong amount of money? What do I mean by that? Obviously, the worst amount of money is not enough, but a lot of my friends and a lot of people, I think, at this summit suffer from just having the wrong amount of money. What do I mean by that? They have enough money so they don't have to do something right away, but they don't have enough money to retire or go into philanthropy or really pursue something creative and not make money.

53:00That's exactly the wrong amount of money. And I would say a good 50 % of my friends who kind of hit a wall, got stuck, experienced their first failure, sit around and wait for the perfect thing and wake up one, two, three years later and really don't have a professional purpose or a professional source of gravity. and you know the kind of basic stuff right uh do something in the agency of others be in service to others but more than anything i think the call sign is uh just now and that is don't let perfect be the enemy of good and uh give yourself a certain amount of time to find something and within that amount of time when it elapses take the best thing that you have and it might not be the, it might not foot to the expectations that you have for yourself or be really exciting or dramatic or really lucrative.

53:51But the thing about working is it leads to other opportunities. And what I see is a lot of people who kind of are cast into the wilderness and then come out of the wilderness with no fucking skills. And that is you'd be surprised how much your Rolodex and your skills atrophy. And so what is the key? Do you want to write a book? Do you want to start a podcast? Do you want to try and raise a fund? Do you want to start a company? What is the key? what is the critical success factor? Is it finding the right people? Is it finding capital? Is it thinking through? Is it positioning the concept? Is it doing more research?

54:21No, the key is now. You want to write a book, open your fucking laptop and start writing. And it's going to be shit. But then when you go back and edit it, it'll be less shitty. And then if you find someone to help you review it and you find some people, it'll get dramatically even less shittier. All right, you want to start a business? Nobody knows. The only way you have a successful business is you start a bad one then you start iterating. But here's the key, starting. You want to be in a nonprofit? You want to start helping other people? We'll start with one person and see if, in fact, your infrastructure, your skills, your expertise tangibly change the community, the environment, or their life.

54:57What is key to all of this? Three words. First N, second O, third W. I have so many people I run across who are searching, not because they're not talented, not because there's not opportunity, but they're thinking they're going to find the perfect thing. No, find the best thing that is now and get started. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Caroline Shagrin. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn. And please follow our Prop G Markets pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.