Like a lot of billionaires, former Google chairman Eric Schmidt is worried about birth rates.
“We, collectively as a society, are not having enough humans,” Schmidt said in a newly released recording of his recent talk at the TED Conference. “Look at the reproduction rate in Asia. It was essentially 1.0 for two parents. This is not good.”
But unlike another one of his billionaire brethren, Schmidt wasn’t raising the issue in order to advocate for more prolific procreation. He was making the case for why we, as humans, should welcome the advancement of AI, a case that Schmidt has, oh, just about 5 billion reasons to make. “For the rest of our lives the key problem is going to be getting the people who are productive, that is in the productive period of lives, to be more productive,” Schmidt said, noting that AI tools will “radically improve that productivity.”
“It’s unbelievable what’s going to happen,” Schmidt said. “Hopefully we will get it in the right direction.”
Yes, hopefully! Because for all his AI boosterism, Schmidt also delivered a dire warning about how the race for AI dominance can all go wrong. In his remarks, Schmidt described a scenario where a hypothetical good guy (read: the United States) gains an insurmountable lead in AI over a hypothetical bad guy (read: China). In that worst case scenario, Schmidt predicted that the bad guy will stop at nothing to thwart the good guy’s lead, even if that means bombing the data centers that the good guy’s AI systems operate out of. “These conversations are occurring around nuclear opponents today in our world,” Schmidt warned. His proposed solution to this potential threat, of course, is not to cease AI development (again, 5 billion reasons), but to build guardrails around it.
Schmidt delivered these remarks last month, but they’re being released at an opportune moment, as Republicans attempt to sneak a 10-year ban on state AI regulations into their spending bill. A provision in the bill would thwart a raft of AI guardrails that states have already put into place and would prohibit them from adding new ones in near the near future, all while Congress, which has pledged to act on AI for years and produced nothing, sits on its hands. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is actively lifting what few barriers on AI proliferation the Biden administration previously put in place.
While tech leaders like OpenAI’s Sam Altman and others have, unsurprisingly, argued against a patchwork approach to regulating AI in states, the provision in the spending bill has drawn widespread backlash from tech safety groups who have watched Big Tech foreclose other kinds of regulation on similar grounds. “Lawmakers stalled on social media safeguards for a decade and we are still dealing with the fallout. Now apply those same harms to technology moving as fast as AI,” said Brad Carson, president of the advocacy group Americans for Responsible Innovation, in a statement. “Without first passing significant federal rules for AI, banning state lawmakers from taking action just doesn’t make sense. Ultimately, the move to ban AI safeguards is a giveaway to Big Tech that will come back to bite us.”
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