Never mind that Google is working on a kill switch to control robots, executive chairman Eric Schmidt thinks there’s nothing to worry about because “the state of the earth” does not support these killer AI scenarios. In other words, let’s come back to reality here.
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Speaking at Stockholm’s Brilliant Minds conference, Schmidt acknowledged the fears over superintelligent AI that people like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have raised. The latter even hinted recently that Google itself was the only AI company that worried him.
Schmidt’s response boils down to this. Stephen Hawking? Brilliant guy! But not a computer scientist. Elon Musk? Brilliant guy! Also not a computer scientist. Stay in your lane, folks.
He adds:
The scenario you’re just describing is the one where the computers get so smart is that they want to destroy us at some point in their evolving intelligence due to some bug. My question to you is: don’t you think the humans would notice this, and start turning off the computers? We’d have a race between humans turning off computers, and the AI relocating itself to other computers, in this mad race to the last computer, and we can’t turn it off, and that’s a movie. It’s a movie. The state of the earth currently does not support any of these scenarios.
Let’s hope he’s right.