Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said he sees an “existential risk” in artificial intelligence as the technology becomes more advanced.
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Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt warned on Wednesday that artificial intelligence could pose “existential risks” and governments needed to know how to ensure the technology was not misused by “nefarious people”.
The future of artificial intelligence has come to the center of conversations among technologists and policymakers, who are grappling with where the technology is headed and how it should be regulated.
ChatGPT, the chatbot that was all the rage last year, can be said to have inspired more awareness of artificial intelligence because major companies around the world Seek to launch competitors’ products and tout their AI capabilities.
Speaking at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council summit in London, Schmidt said he was concerned that AI was an “existential risk.”
“Existential risk is defined as the harm or death of many, many people,” Schmidt said.
“In some cases not today, but soon, these systems will be able to find zero-day exploits in the network problems, or discover new biological species. Now, this is fiction today, but its reasoning is likely true. When this happens, we wonder how to make sure these things aren’t misused by the bad guys. “
Zero-day attacks are security holes that hackers find in software and systems.
Schmidt, who was Google’s chief executive from 2001 to 2011, didn’t have a firm view on how AI should be regulated, but said it was a “broader societal issue.” However, he said it was unlikely that the United States would create a new regulatory agency dedicated to artificial intelligence.
Schmidt is not the first major tech figure to warn about the risks of artificial intelligence.
Open AI CEO Sam Altman, who developed ChatGPT, acknowledged in March that he was “a bit scared” artificial intelligence. He said he was concerned about authoritarian governments developing the technology,
tesla CEO Elon Musk He has said in the past that he sees artificial intelligence as one of the “greatest risks” facing civilization.
Even now Google and letter CEO Sundar Pichai, who most recently oversaw the company’s launch of its own chatbot Called the Bard AI, explain The technology will “impact every product in every company”, adding that society needs to prepare for the change.
Schmidt is a member of the U.S. National Security Council on Artificial Intelligence, which in 2019 began examining the technology, including a potential regulatory framework.committee Leave a comment in 2021warning that the United States is ill-prepared for the era of artificial intelligence.