Former Google CEO and Chairman of the Board Eric Schmidt believes that extremely powerful artificial intelligence systems will be strictly protected by governments in the future. He spoke about this in an interview with Noema.
«I suspect that eventually both the United States and China will have a small number of extremely powerful computers with the ability to autonomously invent that will exceed what we want to provide either to our citizens without permission or to our competitors. …They will be housed in a military base that will be powered by some kind of nuclear energy source and surrounded by barbed wire and machine guns,» Schmidt says.
Schmidt served as Google’s CEO and chairman of the board from 2001 to 2011 before handing the reins back to co-founder Larry Page. After that, he served as the search giant’s executive chairman and technical advisor before finally leaving the company in early 2020. Since then, Schmidt, 69, has been interested in AI and studying its impact on society. He wrote the book «The Age of AI» together with the late diplomat Henry Kissinger and MIT Dean of Computer Science Daniel Hattenlocher. It describes in detail the risks and opportunities that AI will bring.
Although it may seem far-fetched at the moment, Schmidt’s prediction may come true given how competitive countries already are when it comes to maintaining leadership in the AI race. The US has recently tightened controls on its technology exports to China, limiting sales of AI chips made by companies such as NVIDIA.
The same is true for China, which is working to minimize its dependence on American-made chips. Chinese officials are forcing domestic tech giants such as Alibaba and TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to buy locally made AI chips.
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