Ex-Google CEO warns artificial intelligence could be used to kill ‘lots of people’
A former Google CEO has warned that artificial intelligence will be used to kill people in the future.
Eric Schmidt, who spent two decades at the helm of the search giant, told a gathering of senior executives on Wednesday that he believed AI posed an “existential risk” to humanity “defined as many people wounded or killed”. ‘
The software Ph.D. said the technology, which Google helps lead through its relatively primitive Bard chatbot system, could be “misused by bad people” when it becomes more advanced.
Schmidt, who recently chaired the US National Security Commission on AI, is the latest to make such claims.
“There are scenarios, not today, but in the reasonable future, where these systems will be able to find zero-day exploits in cyber problems, or discover new types of biology,” Schmidt said before the Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit in London.
So-called “zero-day exploits” are security flaws in code ranging from personal computing to digital banking to infrastructure that has only just been discovered and therefore not yet patched by teams of cybersecurity. Zero-days are the most popular tools in the hacker arsenal.
Schmidt didn’t go into detail about what the “new types of biology” dreamed up by a mischievous AI worries him most about.
“Now that’s fiction today,” Schmidt warned, “but his reasoning is probably true. And when that happens, we want to be prepared to know how to make sure these things aren’t misused. knowingly by malicious people.
Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and the late Stephen Hawking are among AI’s most famous critics who believe it poses a “profound risk to society and humanity” and could have consequences. “catastrophic effects”.
