The former Google CEO is worried about artificial intelligence being “harmed to innocent people” to terrorists or “illegal people.”
Eric Schmidt told the BBC:
A high-tech billionaire who posted a senior post on Google from 2001 to 2017 said, “North Korea, or even Iran, or even Russia, can employ technology and misuse it to create biological weapons.” Ta.
He called for government oversight of private tech companies developing AI models, but warned that overregulation could curb innovation.
Schmidt agreed to US export controls on powerful microchips that enhance the most advanced AI systems.
Before he took office, former US President Joe Biden restricted microchips exports to all but 18 countries in order to slow the enemy’s progress towards AI research.
This decision could still be reversed by Donald Trump.
“Think about North Korea, or Iran, or even Russia, which has evil targets,” Schmidt said.
“This technology is fast enough to embrace it so that they can exploit it and do real harm,” he told today’s presenter Amol Rajan.
He added that “bad biological attacks from evil people” can be created to develop weapons using AI systems with the wrong hands.
“I’m always worried about the Osama bin Laden scenario. There are truly evil people there who take over some aspects of our modern life and use it to harm innocent people,” he said.
Bin Laden orchestragedy of the 9/11 attack in 2001. There, al-Qaeda terrorists ruled the planes to kill thousands of people in American soil.
Schmidt proposed a balance between government oversight of AI development and sector overregulation.
“The truth is that AI and the future are primarily built by private companies,” Schmidt said.
“It’s really important for the government to understand what we’re doing and look at us.”
He added: “We don’t argue that these things can be done unilaterally without oversight. I think they should be regulated.”
He was speaking from Paris. There, the AI Action Summit ended with the US and the UK refusing to sign the contract.
Vice President JD Vance said the regulations “kill transformative industries as if they were taking off.”
Schmidt said the outcome of too many regulations in Europe was “the AI revolution, the most important revolution in my opinion since electricity, will not be invented in Europe.”
He also said that large tech companies “didn’t understand” the possibilities AI could have had 15 years ago, but now they do.
“My experience with tech leaders is that they understand the impact they have, but they may make different values judgments than governments do,” he said. .
Schmidt was head of Google when the company purchased Android, which makes the world’s most used mobile phone operating system.
He currently supports initiatives to keep phones away from school.
“I am one of those who don’t understand and I take responsibility for the world not functioning perfectly as our engineers think,” he said.
“The situation with the kids is particularly disturbing to me.”
“I think smartphones with kids are safe,” he said.
On social media — he supports the proposal to ban children under the age of 16 — he added:
Actors to limit children’s smartphone usage claim that mobile phones are addictive and “snatched children from activities essential to healthy development.”
Australia’s Parliament passed a law in 2024 prohibiting the use of social media for those under the age of 16, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese saying it’s important to protect children from their “harm.”
A recent study published in Medical Journal The Lancet suggested that the ban on mobile phones in schools did not improve student behavior or grades.
However, we found that long spending on smartphones and social media in general is linked to the bad outcomes of all these measurements.
