The former chief executive of Google has warned that artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to harm or kill “many, many people” in the near future.
Eric Schmidt said that he was concerned about the “existential risk” of the rapidly evolving technology and warned that it would be difficult to contain.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt says artificial intelligence poses an “existential risk” to humanity.Credit: Bloomberg
“My concern with AI is actually existential, and existential risk is defined as many, many, many, many people harmed or killed. And there are scenarios not today but reasonably soon, where these systems will be able to find zero-day exploits, cyber issues or discover new kinds of biology,” Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal CEO Council conference in London.
“This is fiction today but the reasoning is likely to be true. And when that happens we want to be ready to know how to make sure these things are not misused by evil people.”
The warning comes as British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hosted executives from the world’s top technology labs at Downing Street. He met Sam Altman, the chief executive of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, alongside Google’s DeepMind and the AI start-up Anthropic.
Discussions focused on creating an international framework for regulating AI, and responding to the rise of China in the field.
Schmidt, who was Google’s chief executive for a decade from 2001 and then its executive chairman until 2015, has also chaired the US national security commission on AI.
He said it would be extremely difficult to control the spread of AI, which he compared to the rise of nuclear technology.