Former Google CEO and chairperson Dr Eric Schmidt has warned that AI will ultimately need to be unplugged.

Schmidt gave an interview via videolink from the US with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Sydney Dialogue on Monday.

“AI will enable enormous gains in biology, science, material science, climate change, medical care, education – globally, smarter humans, more productive businesses,” The Australian Financial Review reported Schmidt as saying.

“It also has a set of downsides, the most obvious one being the ability to do targeted misinformation. The [AI] systems are really smart right now, they’re still under our control, which is a good thing.

“My advice is, when they’re doing their own thing, we unplug them.”

 

Dr Eric Schmidt. Image: Schmidt Futures.

He said that “if you believe that democracies basically depend on trust … the arrival of AI-powered misinformation, fake videos, fake messaging and so forth – especially targeting at you, could really put democracies at risk”.

Autocracies “just ban social media”, Schmidt said. “I’m not suggesting we ban it, I’m suggesting that we think about how are we going to deal with a world where it’s so cheap to generate misinformation?”

He said China is “the greatest adversary, commercially, that we’re going to see in my lifetime. Their system is organised around innovation in things that we need and make and use every day … This is the enduring competition of the ages. It’s important that democracy wins”.

Schmidt describes himself as “an accomplished technologist, entrepreneur and philanthropist”.

Prior to his 2001-2011 stint at the helm of Google, he was Chairman and CEO of Novell. He has also worked for Sun Microsystems, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Bell Laboratories and Zilog.