The Risks and Opportunities of an AI Future — with Eric Schmidt

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Episode 326, 3260 area code serving Southwest in Ohio in 1926. The first SATs took place. The latest exam for me, a prostate exam. My doctor told me it's perfectly normal to become aroused and even ejaculate. That being said, I still wish he hadn't. Go, go!

Welcome to the 326 episode of the Prop G bot. In today's episode, we speak with Eric Schmidt, a technologist, entrepreneur and philanthropist. He also previously served as Google's chief executive officer. I don't know if you've heard of him. It's a tech company. You can actually go there and type in your own name and you see what the world thinks of you. Later, he was the executive chairman and technical advisor. We discussed with Eric the dangers and opportunities that I present and his latest book.

Genesis, artificial intelligence, hope in the human spirit. That sounds like a show on the Hallmark channel in hell. Okay, what's happening? Off to Vegas this week, I've been at Summit. That's beautiful here. It's lovely. I love kind of the Western Baja Sky or light. I think I may retire here. When I retire in Mexico, I think it's like the food's amazing. The people are incredibly cool, the service goal. No joke, I think that Mexico is the best vacation.

deal in the world. Anyways, where am I headed to next? I go to Vegas tonight. I know that you asked doing a talk there tomorrow. Vegas trying to wait. Not so much fun. Not so much fun. That definitely kind of an unusual vibe there. And then I go to LA for a couple days. Daddy will be at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Swing by, say hi. I'll be the guy alone at the bar.

I love eating alone at the Polo Lounge. How do you know if I like you? I stare at your shoes and I'm mine. Anyways, then I'm back to Vegas for Formula One, which I am so excited about. I love it. The city comes alive. And then, just because I know you like to keep on my travels, I head to Sao Paulo with a nicest hotel in the world is right now. I think the Rosewood in Sao Paulo. I think Rosewood is actually the best brand in high end hospitality. Isn't that good to know? A lot of insight here. A lot of insight.

All right, let's move on some news in the media and entertainment space. Netflix said that a record 60 million households worldwide tuned in to watch the boxing match between Jake Palomite. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Just a quick announcement. This is very exciting. I just struck a deal as I told him going to LA and you're the first to know that Hulu is announced it'll be live streaming a fight between me and Jimmy Carter.

By the way, if you get paid $20 million, I don't know what Tyson was paying, I think it was 20 million, you have an obligation to either kick the shit out of someone or have the shit kicked out of you. This kind of jab snort through your nose and just stay away from the guy. I don't buy it. I want my $12 back Netflix. Despite the disappointment in the fight, Jake Paul did in fact defeat Mike Tyson in eight rounds. Can you even call it a win? Can you?

The fight was shown in over 6,000 bars and restaurants across the US breaking the record for the biggest commercial distribution in the sport, but the record numbers came with a few hiccups. Viewers reported various tech issues, including slow loading times, pixelated screens, and a malfunctioning earpiece from one of the commentators. That's a weird one. A malfunctioning earpiece for one of the commentators data from

Down Detector revealed that user reported out who just peaked at more than 95,000 around 11 PM Eastern Time. Frustrated fans flooded social media criticizing Netflix.

for the poor streaming quality. Netflix, CTO, Elizabeth Stone, soon to be probably former CTO, wrote to employees, I'm sure many of you have seen the chatter in the press and the social media about the quality issues. We don't want to dismiss the poor experience of some members and know we have room for improvement, but still consider this event a huge success. No, that was a pretty big fuck up for you, Ms. Stone. Specifically, Netflix

Tries to garner evaluation not of a media company but a tech company which means you're actually supposed to be pretty good at this shit and didn't you know exactly how many people were going to show up for this didn't you. Kind of weren't you able to sort of estimate pretty accurately just exactly how many people would be dialing at exactly the same time and then.

test the shit out of this. You're beginning to smell a little bit like Twitter in a presidential announcement. That's just as unforgivable for a fucking tech company. Come on, guys, this is what you do. This isn't the first time Netflix has fumbled with a live event. Last year, their love is blind reunion show faced a similar situation, leaving viewers waiting over an hour before a recorded version was made available. And this brings up a bigger question with Netflix is pushing to live sports, including NFL games scheduled for Christmas and a major deal with

WWE starting next year. Can they deliver the kind of quality viewers expect that they get from broadcast cable? It looks like what's old is new again and that we have taken for granted kind of the production quality.

of live TV and how difficult it is. That's one thing I'll say about morning Joe, or the view, or even I think Fox does a great, they're great at delivering TV live. I think CNN also does a fantastic job. Netflix isn't alone. Other streaming platforms, including Comcast's Peacock, have also been getting into live sports. Earlier this year, Peacock's January platform came between the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins drew 23 million viewers, which broke records for internet usage in the U.S.

Get this, the game is responsible for 30% of internet traffic that night. That's like squid games. This is all proof that the market for live sports on streaming platforms is a massive opportunity and companies are willing to spend big. According to the Wall Street Journal, Netflix is paying around $75 million per NFL game this season.

They also recently signed a 10-year $5 million deal with WWE. It used to be that live in sports were sort of the last walls to be breached in broadcast cable, like we'll always have sports. And then the people with the cheapest capital and the deepest pockets shut up and said, hey, we'll take Thursday night football. Hey, we'll take the Logan Paul or Jake Paul as a jaker Logan. And I can't remember.

I mean, literally broadcast cable television right now. It's like Mark Twain said about going bankrupt. It was slowly then suddenly. We're in the suddenly stage of the decline of linear ad supported TV. It has gotten really bad in the last few months. I had

Breakfast with the former CEO of CNN, who's a lovely guy, and he said that CNN's viewership versus the last election has been cut in half. Can you imagine trying to explain to advertisers? Our viewership is off 50% since the last time we were talking about election advertising. My theory is that

The unnatural, unearned torrent of cash that local news stations have been earning for the last 20 years is about to go away. And what are we talking about? Scott, tell us more. What are you saying? Effectively, a lot of smart companies, including I think Hearst and others, have gone around and bought up these local news stations. And why? Because they're dying, aren't they? Well, yeah, they are. But old people watch local news, mostly to get the weather and local sports, because that Jerry Dumphey is just so likable in that hot little number. They always have some old guy with good hair and broad shoulders.

who makes you feel comfortable and safe, and some hot woman in her 30s who's still waiting for the call up to do daytime TV. And everybody, old people love this, and old people vote. Now what's happening? Okay, so the numbers are in.

A million people watch the best shows on MSNBC, the average age of 70, it's mostly white, and it's mostly women. So a 70-year-old white woman podcasts, 34-year-old male. Think about that. Also, the zeitgeist is different. People go to cable news to sanctify their religion, or specifically their politics. People come to podcasts to learn. The zeitgeist is different.

We try to present our guests in a more aspirational line. We're not looking for a gotcha moment to go live on TikTok. It's not, say, a twist of phrase, did it done in six minutes because we got a break for an opioid-induced constipation commercial or a life alert. I'm falling!

We don't do that shit. We sell zipper cruder and athletic greens and fund rise and different kind of modern cool stuff like that. Also, Viori. I'm wearing Viori shorts right now. By the way, I fucking love this athleisure. Oh my God. I look so good in this shit. Actually, no one really looks good. No man looks good in athleisure, but I look less bad than I'm looking most athleisure. I love the fabrics.

I'm not even getting paid to say this, wearing it right now. So let's talk a little bit about Netflix. It's up 81% year today. True story about Netflix at 10 bucks a share. That's a good news. The bad news is I sold it at eight bucks a share. And now it's at $840. Daddy would be live broadcasting from his own fucking Gulf Stream right now. Had I not been such a shit. I want to find a time machine, get in and go back, find me, kill me, and then kill myself. Jesus.

God, anyways, Amazon is up 34%, I do on that stock. Disney is up 22%, my stock pick for 2024. Warner Brothers discovery down 22%. Jesus Christ, I'm alone, you fired the wrong guy, Paramount. By the way, Zazoff, the guy who was overseeing a destruction of about 60 or 70% of shareholder value since he talked to a bunch of stupid people into why this merger made any fucking sense and took on way too much debt, he's managed to pull out about a third of a billion dollars despite destroying a massive amount of shareholder value. Paramount,

is down 28% year today. Comcast is down 2.3% Comcast. I think it's arguably the best run of the cable folks, obviously not including Netflix, which is just a gangster run company. So Netflix has about 250 million users. Amazon Prime Video has 200 million. Is that fair though? Because you just automatically get it with Prime.

Disney plus $150 million, Max 95. I love Max. We sold our series into Netflix, our big tech drama.

I think most of us would have liked HBO, just because HBO has this certain culture that feeds the water cooler. You're talking about something in streaming media. You're usually talking about something on Macs, but Netflix has also got bigger reach. These are good problems. Hulu's Paramount is at 63 million. Hulu 49, Peacock 28.

ESPN Plus at 26, Apple TV at 25, and then stars. Remember them at 16 million. Effectively, these guys have cheaper cap at all. They're absolutely killing linear TV. Does that mean it's a bad business now? There's someone's going to come and roll up all of these assets between the old Viacama assets, CNN, Turner, all the Disney shit, ABC. They're going to roll them all up, milk them for their cash flow, cut costs faster.

than the revenue declines. These businesses, while they seem to be going out of business pretty fast right now, it'll probably level out. AOL's still a small but great business. I think it does something like $400 or $500 million in EBITDA, because there's still a lot of people that depend on AOL and rural areas for their dial-up for their internet. And some people will kind of hang in there, if you will. But this is going to be a distress play. They're going to stop this consensual hallucination that these things are going to ever grow again. They'll consolidate them to start cutting costs. One of the best investments I've ever made.

yellow pages. We bought a yellow pages company for about two or two and a half times cash flow. Yeah, it's going down by eight to 12% a year. But if you got cost faster than that by going and buying the other shitty yellow pages companies and then consolidating the staff, which is Latin for layoff people and you can cost faster than 8%, you have an increase in even to every year. I still find across the entire asset class, and this is where I'll wrap up.

In general, a basic axiom that I have found holds water through the test of time around investing is the sexier it is, the lower the ROI. And if you look at asset classes in terms of their sex appeal, venture investing or angel investing is fun, right? It's for what I call FIPS, formerly important people that want to stay involved and want to help entrepreneurs. But be clear, the only return you get is psychic. It is a terrible asset class, even if something works. And at that stage, it is very hard to predict. You're talking about one in seven, maybe.

do well and even at one company likely you'll get washed out along the way a little bump and the VCs have showed up and they'll wash you out. It is a very tough asset class to make money.

Venture does better, but the majority of the returns are not only crowded to a small number of brands. They get all the deal flow, but a small number of partners within that small number of firms. And then you have growth. I think that's better. Then you have IPOs. Unfortunately, IPOs, that winter is really ugly right now. The IPO market's basically been in a pretty big deep freeze for several years now. People keep thinking it's going to come back. We got excited about Reddit, but not a lot followed.

And then you go into public company stocks. It's impossible to pick stocks by an index fund. Then you get into distressed or mature companies dividend plays. And then what I love is distressed. I find that distressed is the best asset class. Why? What business has the greatest likelihood of succeeding anything in senior care? Why? Again, see above the less sex it is. People don't want to be around old people or mind some of death.

They're generally pretty boring. I know. I'm supposed to say they just have so much experience and wisdom sometimes. And people want to avoid them. People want to hang out with hot young people, right? And people want to hang out with hot young companies, specifically capital wants to hang out.

with hot, young, growing companies. And they don't like the way that old companies smell, so to speak. So they avoid them. And that's why there's a greater return on investment in distress. What's the learning here? Sex appeal and ROI are inversely correlated. So yeah, if you want to invest in a members club downtown for the fashion industry and the music industry, have at it. But keep in mind ROI and sex appeal inversely correlated. We'll be right back for a conversation with Eric Schmidt.

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for your growing business. That's two weeks free at onepassword.com slash prof. Don't let security slow your business down. Go to onepassword.com slash prof. Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Eric Schmidt, a technologist, entrepreneur, philanthropist and Google former CEO.

Eric, what does this podcast find you? I'm in Boston. I'm at Harvard and giving a speech to students later today. Oh, nice. So let's bust right into it. You have a new book out that you co-authored with the late Henry Kissinger titled Genesis, Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit. What is it about this book or give us what you would call the pillars of insight here around that'll help people understand the evolution of AI?

Well, the world is full of stories about what AI can do. And we generally agree with those. What we believe, however, is the world is not ready for this. And there are so many examples, whether it's trust, military power, deception, economic power, the effect on humans, the effect on children that are relatively poorly explored. So the reader of this book doesn't need to understand AI, but they need to be worried

that the stuff is going to be unmanaged. Dr. Kissinger was very concerned that the future should not be left to people like myself. He believed very strongly that these tools are so powerful in terms of their effect on human society. It was important that the decisions be made by more than just the tech people.

And the book is really a discussion about what happens to the structure of organizations, the structure of jobs, the structure of power, and all the things that people worry about. I personally believe that this will happen much, much more quickly than societies are ready for, including in the United States and China. It's happening very fast.

And what do you see as the real existential threats here? Is it that it becomes sentient? Is it misinformation, income inequality, loneliness? What do you think are the first and foremost biggest concerns you have about this rapid evolution of AI?

There are many things to worry about. Before we say the bad things, let me remind you, enormous improvements in drug capability for healthcare, solutions to climate change, better vehicles, huge discoveries in science, greater productivity for kind of everyone, a universal doctor, a universal educator, all of these things are coming. And those are fantastic.

a long way, because these are very powerful, especially in the hands of an evil person and we know evil exists, these systems can be used to harm large numbers of people. The most obvious one is their use in biology. Can these systems at some point in the future generate biological pathogens that could harm many, many, many, many humans?

Today, we're quite sure they can't, but there's a lot of people who think that they will be able to unless we take some action. Those actions are being worked on now. What about cyber attacks? You have a lone actor, a terrorist group, North Korea, whomever, whatever your evil person or group is, and they decide to take down the financial system using a previously unknown attack vector, so-called zero-day exploits.

So, the systems are so powerful that we are quite concerned that in addition to democracies using them for gains, dictators will use them to aggregate power, and they'll be used in a harmful and military context. I'm freaked out about these AI girlfriends. I feel as if the biggest threat in the US right now is loneliness that leads to extremism.

I see these AI girlfriends and AI searches popping up. And I see a lot of young men who have a lack of romantic or economic opportunities turning to AI girlfriends and begin to sequester from real relationships. And they become less likely to believe in climate change, more likely to engage misogynistic content, sequester from school, their parents work. And some, they become really shitty citizens.

And I think men, young men are having so much trouble that this low risk entry into these faux relationships is just gonna speedball loneliness and the externalities of loneliness, your thoughts.

I completely agree. There's lots of evidence that there's now a problem with young men. In many cases, the path to success for young men has been, shall we say, being made more difficult because they're not as educated as the women are now. Remember, there are more women in college than men.

and many of the traditional paths are no longer as available. And so they turn to the online world for enjoyment and sustenance, but also because of the social media algorithms they find like-minded people who ultimately radicalize them either in a horrific way like terrorism or in the kind of way that you're describing or they're just maladjusted.

Um, this is a good example of an unexpected problem of existing technology. So now imagine that the AI girlfriend or boyfriend of issues AI girlfriend as an example is perfect, perfect visually, perfect emotionally.

And the girlfriend in this case captures your mind as a man to the point where she or whatever it is takes over the way you thinking you're obsessed with her. That kind of obsession is possible, especially for people who are not fully formed.

Parents are going to have to be more involved for all the obvious reasons, but at the end of the day, parents can only control what their sons and daughters are doing within reason. We've ended up, again, using teenagers as an example. We have all sorts of rules about age of maturity, 16, 18, what have you, 21 in some cases, and yet you put a 12 or 13 year old in front of one of these things, and they have access to every evil as well as every good in the world, and they're not ready to take it.

So I think the general question of, are you mature enough to handle it? Sort of the general version of your AI girlfriend example is unresolved. And so I think people, most people would agree that the pace of AI is scary and that our institutions and our ability to regulate are not keeping up with the pace of evolution here. And we see what perfectly what happened with social around this.

What can be done? What's an example or a construct or framework that you can point to where we get the good stuff, the drug discovery, the help of climate change, but attempt to screen out or at least put in check or put in some guardrails around the bad stuff? What are you advocating for?

I think it starts with having an honest conversation of where the problems come from. So you have people who are absolutists on free speech, which I happen to agree with, but they confuse free speech of an individual versus free speech for a computer. I am strongly in favor of free speech for every human. I am not in favor of free speech for computers. And the algorithms are not necessarily optimizing the best thing for humanity.

So as a general point, specifically, we're going to have to have some conversations about what age are things appropriate. And we're also going to have to change some of the laws, for example, Section 230, to allow for liability in the worst possible cases.

So when someone is harmed from this technology, we need to have a solution to prevent further harm. Every new invention has created harm. Think about cars, right? So cars used to hit everything and they were very safe. Now cars are really quite safe.

certainly by comparison to anything in history. So the history of these inventions is that you allow for the greatness and you police technically the guardrails. You put limits on what they can do. And it's an appropriate debate, but it's one that we have to have now for this technology. I'm particularly concerned about the issue that you mentioned earlier about the effect of on human psyche.

Dr. Kissinger, who studied Kant, was very concerned, and we write in the book at some length, about what happens when your worldview is taken over by a computer as opposed to your friends. You're isolated. The computer is feeding you stuff. It's not optimized around human values, good or bad. God knows what it's trying to do. It's trying to make money or something. That's not a good answer.

So I think most reasonable people would say, OK, some sort of fossil fuels are a net good. I would argue pesticides are a net good. But we have emission standards and an FDA. Most people would, I think, loosely agree or mostly agree that some sort of regulation that keeps these things in check makes sense. Now, let's talk about big tech, which you were an instrumental player in.

You guys figured out a way, quite frankly, to overrun Washington with lobbyists and avoid all reasonable regulation. Why are things going to be different now than what they were in your industry when you were involved in it?

Well, President Trump has indicated that he is likely to repeal the executive order that came out of President Biden, which was an attempt at this. So I think a fair prediction is that for the next four years, there'll be very little regulation in this area as the president will be focused on other things. So what will happen in those companies is if there is real harm, there's liability, there's lawsuits and things. So the companies are not completely scot free.

Companies remember our economic agents and they have lawyers whose jobs are to protect their intellectual property and their goals. So it's going to take, I'm sorry to say, it's likely to take some kind of a calamity to cause a change in regulation. And I remember when I was in California, when I was younger, California driver's license says the address on your driver's license was public.

And there was a horrific crime where a woman was followed to her home and then she was murdered based on that information, and then they changed the law. And my reaction was, didn't you foresee this? You put millions and millions of licensed information to the public, and you don't think that

Some idiot who's horrific is going to harm somebody. So my frustration is not that it will occur because I'm sure it will. But why did we not anticipate that as an example? We should anticipate make a list of the biggest harms. I'll give you another example. These systems should not be allowed access to weapons.

Very simple. You don't want the AI deciding when to launch a missile. You want the human to be responsible. And these kinds of sensible regulations are not complicated to state. Are you familiar with character AI? I am. Really just a horrific incident where a 14 year old thinks he's established his relationship with an AI agent.

that he thinks is a character from Game of Thrones is obviously unwell, although he, my understanding is from his mother who's taken this on as an issue, understandably. He did not qualify as someone who was mentally ill, establishes this very deep relationship with obviously a very nuanced character. And the net effect is he, he contemplates suicide and she invites him to do that.

And the story does not end well. And my view, Eric, is that if we're waiting for people's critical thinking to show up or for the better angels of CEOs of companies that are there to make a profit, that's what they're supposed to do. They're doing their job. We're just going to have tragedy after tragedy after tragedy. My sense is someone needs to go to jail. And in order to do that, we need to pass laws showing that if you're reckless with technology and we can reverse engineer it to the death of a 14-year-old,

that you are criminally liable, but I don't see that happening. So I would push back on the notion that people need to think more critically. That would be lovely. I don't see that happening. I have no evidence that any CEO of a tech company is going to do anything but increase the value of their shares, which I understand and is a key component of capitalism. It feels like we need laws that either remove this liability shield. I mean, does any of this change until someone shows up in an orange jumpsuit?

I can tell you how we dealt with this at Google. We had a rule that in the morning, we would look at things. And if there was something that looked like real harm, we would resolve it by noon.

and we would make the necessary adjustments. The example that you gave is horrific, but it's all too common. And it's going to get worse for the following reason. So now imagine you have a two year old and you have the equivalent of a bear that is the two year old's best friend. And every year the bear gets smarter and the two year old gets smarter too, becomes three, four, five and so forth.

That now 15 year olds best friend will not be a boy or girl of the same age. It'll be a digital device. And such people highlighted in your terrible example are highly suggestible. So either the people who were building the equivalent of that bear 10 years from now are going to be smart enough to never suggest harm or they're going to get regulated and criminalized.

Those are the choices. I used to say that the Internet is really wonderful, but it's full of misinformation, and there's an off button for a reason, turn it off. I can't do that anymore. The Internet is so intertwined in our daily lives, all of us, every one of us, for the good and bad, that we can't get out of the cesspool if we think it's a cesspool, and we can't make it better because it keeps coming at us.

The industry to answer your question, the industry is optimized to maximize your attention and monetize it. So that behavior is going to continue. The question is, how do you manage the extreme cases? Anything involving personal harm of the nature that you're describing will be regulated one way or the other.

Yeah, at some point, it's just a damage we incur until then, right? If we've had 40 congressional hearings on child safety and social media and we've had zero laws. In fairness to that, there is a very, very extensive set of laws around child sexual abuse, which is obviously horrific as well. And those laws are universally implemented and well-adhered to.

So we do have examples where everyone agrees what the harm is. I think all of us would agree that a suicide of a teenager is not okay. And so regulating the industry so it doesn't generate that message, stress-free as a brainer. The ones which will be much harder are where,

The system has essentially captured the emotions of the person and is feeding them back to the person, as opposed to making suggestions. And we talk about this in the book. When the system is shaping your thinking, you are being shaped by a computer, you're not shaping it.

And because these systems are so powerful, we worry, and again, we talk about this in the book, of the impact on the perception of truth and of society. Who am I? What do I do? And ultimately, one of the risks here, if we don't get this under control, is that we will be the dogs to the powerful AI, as opposed to us telling the AI what to do.

A simple answer to the question of when is the industry believes that within five to ten years these systems will be so powerful that they might be able to do self-learning. And this is a point where the system begins to have its own actions, its own religion, its called a volition, it's called general intelligence, AGI as it's called, and the arrival of AGI will need to be regulated. We'll be right back.

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We know that social media and a lot of these platforms and apps and time on phone is just not a good idea. I'm curious what you think of my colleagues who are Jonathan Hyde. And that is, is there any reason for anyone under the age of 14 to have a smartphone? And is there any reason for anyone under the age of 16 to be on social media? Should we agegate pornography, alcohol, the military? Shouldn't we specifically the device makers and the operating systems, including your old firm?

Shouldn't they get in the business of age gating? They should. And indeed, Jonathan's work is incredible. He and I wrote an article together two years ago, which called for a number of things in the area of regulating social media. And we start with changing a law called COPA from 13 to 16. And we are quite convinced that using various techniques, we can determine the age of the person with a little bit of work.

And so people say, well, you can't implement it. Well, that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. And so we believe that at least the pernicious effects of this technology on below 16 can be addressed. When I think about all of this, to me, we want children to be able to grow up and grow up with humans as friends. And I'm sure, with the power of AI arrival, that you're going to see a lot of regulation about child content.

what can a child below 16 see? This does not answer the question of what do you do with the 20-year-old, right, who is also still being shaped. And as we know, men develop a little bit later than women. And so let's focus on the underdeveloped man who's having trouble in college or what have you. What do we do with them? And that question remains open. In terms of the idea that the genia is out of the bottle here, and we face a very real issue or fulcrum retention, and that is

We want to regulate it. We want to put in guardrails at the same times we want to let our, you know, our sprinters and our IP and our minds and our universities and our incredible for profit machine. We want to let it run, right? And the fear is that if you regulate it too much, the Chinese or, you know, the Islamic Republic isn't quite as concerned and gets ahead of us on this technology. How do you balance that tension?

There are quite a few people in the industry along with myself who are working on this.

And the general idea is relatively light regulation looking for the extreme cases. So the worst extreme events would be a biological attack, a cyber attack, something that harmed a lot of people, as opposed to a single individual, which is always a tragedy. Any misuse of these in war, any of those kinds of things we worry a lot about. And there's a lot of questions here. One of them is,

do you think that if we had a GI system that developed a way to kill all of the soldiers from the opposition in one day that it would be used?

And I think the answer from a military general perspective would be yes. The next question is, do you think that the North Koreans, for example, or the Chinese would obey the same rules about when to apply that? And the answer is no one believes that they would do it safely and carefully under the way the US law would require. US law has a law called person in the loop or meaningful human control that tries to keep these things from going out of hand. So what I actually think

is that we don't have a theory of deterrence with these new tools. We don't know how to deal with the spread of them. And the simple example

Sorry for the diversion for a sec, but there's closed source and open source. Closed is like you can use it, but the software and the numbers are not available. There are other systems called open source where everything is published. China now has two of what appear to be the most powerful models ever made, and they're completely open.

And we're obviously, you and I are not in China, and I don't know why China made a decision to release them. But surely, evil groups and so forth will start to use those. Now maybe they don't speak Chinese or what have you, or maybe the Chinese just discount the risk. But there's a real risk of proliferation of systems in the hands of terrorism.

And proliferation is not going to occur by misusing Microsoft or Google or what have you. It's going to be by making their own servers in the dark web. And in the example, a worry that we all have is the exfiltration of the models. I'll give you an example. Google or Microsoft or OpenAI spends $200 million or something to build one of these models. They're very powerful. And then some evil actor manages to exfiltrate it out of those companies and put it on the dark web.

we have no theory of what to do when that occurs. Because we don't control the dark web, we don't know how to detect it, and so forth. In the book we talk about this and say that eventually the network systems globally will have fairly sophisticated supervision systems that will watch for this.

because it's another example of proliferation. It's analogous to the spread of enriched uranium. If anyone tried to do that, there's an awful lot of monitoring systems that would say, you have to stop right now or we're gonna shoot you. So you make a really cogent argument for the kind of existential threat here, the weaponization of AI by bad actors. And we have faced similar issues before, my understanding is there are multilateral treaties around bioweapons or we have nuclear arms treaties.

So is this the point in the time where people such as yourself and our defense infrastructure should be thinking about or trying to figure out multilateral agreements? And again, the hard part there is my understanding. It's very hard to monitor things like this. And should we have something along the lines of Interpol that's basically policing this and then fighting fire with fire using AI to go out and find

scenarios where things look very ugly and move in with some sort of international force. It feels like a time for some sort of multinational cooperation is upon us, your thoughts. We agree with you. And in the book, we specifically talk about this in a historical context of the nuclear weapons regime, which Dr. Kissinger, as you know, invented largely. What's interesting is working with him, you realize how long it took for the full solution to occur.

America used the bomb in 1945, Russia or Soviet Union demonstrated in 1949. So that's roughly that was a four-year gap and then there was sort of a real arms race. And once that, it took roughly 15 years for an agreement to come for limitations on these things, during which time we were busy making an enormous number of weapons, which ultimately were a mistake.

including these enormous bombs that were unnecessary. And so things got out of hand. In our case, I think what you're saying is very important that we start now. And here's where I would start. I would start with a treaty that says we're not going to allow anyone who's the signature of this treaty to have automatic weapon systems.

And by automatic weapons, I don't mean automated. I mean ones that make the decision on their own. So an agreement that any use of AI, of any kind in a conflict sense, has to be owned and authorized by a human being who is authorized to make that decision. That would be a simple example. Another thing that you could do as part of that is say that you have a duty to inform.

when you're testing one of these systems in case it gets out of hand. Now, whether these treaties can be agreed to, I don't know. Remember that it was the horror of nuclear war that got people to the table and it still took 15 years. I don't want us to go through an analogous bad incident involving an evil actor in North Korea. Again, I'm just using them as bad examples.

or even Russia today, we obviously don't trust. I don't want to run that experiment and have all that harm and then say, hey, we should have foreseen this. Well, my sense is, when we are better at technology, we're not in a hurry for a multilateral treaty, right? When we're under the impression that our nuclear scientists are better than your, our Nazis are smarter than your Nazis kind of thing, that we like, we don't want a multilateral treaty because we see advantage.

Curious if you agree with this, we have better AIs than anyone else. Does that get in the way of a treaty or should we be doing this from a position of strength? And also, if there's a number two, and maybe you think we're not the number one, but assuming you think that the US is number one in this, who is the number two? Who do you think poses the biggest threat? Is it their technology or their intentions or both? If you were to hear that one of these

really awful things took place. Who would you think most likely are the most likely actors behind it? Is it a rogue state? Is it a terrorist group? Is it a nation state?

First, I think that the short-term threats are from rogue states and from terrorism. And because as we know, there's plenty of groups that seek harm against the elites in any country. Today, the competitive environment is very clear that the US, with a partner UK, I'll give you an example. This week, there were two libraries from China that were released, open source.

One is a problem solver that's very powerful and another one is a large language model that's equal. In some cases exceeds the one from meta with its they use every day. It's called lama three 400 billion.

I was shocked when I read this because I had assumed that are in my conversation with the Chinese that they were two to three years late. It looks to me like it's within a year now. So it'd be fair to say it's the US and then China within a year's time. Everyone else is well behind.

Now, I'm not suggesting that China will launch a rogue attack against an American city, but I am alleging that it's possible that a third party could steal from China because it's open source or from the US if they're malevolent and do that. So the threat escalation matrix goes up with every improvement.

At today, the primary use of these tools is to sow misinformation, which is what you talked about. But remember that there's a transition to agents, and the agents do things. So it's a travel agent or it's, you know, whatever. And the agents speak English, that you give them English and they result, they respond in English so you can concatenate them.

You can literally put Agent 1, talks to Agent 2, talks to Agent 3, talks to Agent 4. And there's a scheduler that makes them all work together. And so for example, you could say to these agents, design me the most beautiful building in the world, go ahead and file all the permits, negotiate the fees of the builders, and tell me how much it's going to cost, and tell my accountant that I need that amount of money. That's the command.

So think about that. Think about the agency, the ability to put an integrated solution that today takes 100 people who are very talented, and you can do it by one command. So that acceleration of power could also be misused. I'll give you another example. You were talking earlier about the impact on social media. I saw a demonstration in England, in fact.

The first command was build a profile of a woman who's 25, she has two kids, and she has the following strange beliefs. And the system wrote the code and created a fake persona that existed on that particular social media case.

then the next command was take that person and modify that person to every possible stereotype, every race, sex, so forth and so on, age, demographic thing with similar views and populate that. And 10,000 people popped up just like that.

So if you wanted, for example, today, this is true today, if you wanted to create a community of 10,000 fake influencers to say, for example, that smoking doesn't cause cancer, which as we know is not true, you could do it. And one person with a PC can do this. Imagine when the AIs are far, far more powerful than they are today.

So one of the things that Dr. Kissinger was known for, and quite frankly, I appreciate, was this notion of rail politic. Obviously, we have aspirations around the way the world should be, but as it relates to decision-making, we're also going to be very cognizant of the way the world is and make some... I mean, he's credited with a lot of very controversial, slash difficult decisions depending on how you look at it.

What I'm hearing you say leads all these roads lead to one place in my kind of, quote unquote, critical thinking or laughter of brain. And that is there's a lot of incentive.

to kiss and make up with China and partner around this stuff. That if China in the US came to an agreement around what they were going to do or not do and bilaterally created a security force and agreed not to sponsor proxy agents against the West or each other, that would be a lot of progress. That might be 50, 60, 80% of the whole shooting match, as if the two of us could say,

We're going to figure out a way to trust each other on this issue. And we're going to fight the bad guys together on this stuff. Your thoughts? So Dr. Kissinger, of course, was the world's expert in China. He opened up China, which is one of his greatest achievements. But he was also a proud American. And he understood that China could go one way or the other.

His view on China was that China, and he wrote a whole book on this, was that China wanted to be the middle kingdom as part of their history, where they sort of dominated all the other countries.

But it's not like America. His view was they wanted to make sure the other countries would show fealty to China. In other words, do what they wanted. And occasionally, if they didn't do something, China would then extract some payment, such as invading the country. That's roughly what Henry would say. So he was a very much a realist about China as well.

his view would be at odds today with Trump's view and the US governments. The US government is completely organized today around decoupling. That is literally separating. And his view, which I can report accurately, because I went to China with him, was that we're never going to be great friends, but we have to learn how to coexist

That means detailed discussions on every issue at great length to make sure that we don't alarm each other or frighten each other. His further concern was not that President Xi would wake up tomorrow and invade Taiwan.

but that you would start with an accident and then there would be an escalatory ladder. And that because the emotions on both sides, you'd end up just like in World War I, which started with a shooting in Sarajevo, that ultimately people found in a few months that they were in a world war that they did not want and did not expect. And once you're in the war, you have to fight. So the concern with China would be roughly that

We are co-dependent and we're not best friends. Being dependent is probably better than being completely independent, that is non-dependent, because it forces some level of understanding and communication. Eric Schmidt is a technologist, entrepreneur and philanthropist. In 2021, he founded the Special Competitive Studies Project, a nonprofit initiative to strengthen America's long-term competitiveness

in AI and technology more broadly. Before that, Eric served as Google's Chief Executive Officer and Chairman and later as Executive Chairman and Technical Advisor. He joins us from Boston, Eric. In addition to your intelligence, I get to sense your heart's in the right place and you're using your human and financial capital to try and make the world a better place. Really appreciate you and your work.

I was aware of happiness. I'm at this gathering called Summit, and I've been struck by how many people are successful, or at least the appearance of being successful, as far as I know the rich kids, but they do seem to be economically secure or over-educated, interesting, some of them started to solve businesses. But what I see is a lot of people searching.

And they'll say shit like, well, I'm just taking a year to really focus on improving my sleep. Okay, no, that sleep is supposed to be part of your arsenal. It's not why you're fighting this war. You need good sleep, but I don't think you should take a year to focus on it. Anyways, that's how I'm boomer of me. But this notion of finding a purpose, and what I have found is, and this is probably one of the accoutrements of a prosperous society,

is ask yourself, do you have the wrong amount of money? Do you have just the wrong amount of money? What do I mean by that? Obviously, the worst amount of money is not enough, but a lot of my friends and a lot of people I think at this summit suffer from just having the wrong amount of money. What do I mean by that? They have enough money so they don't have to do something right away, but they don't have enough money to retire or go into philanthropy or really pursue something creative and not

not make money. That's exactly the wrong amount of money. And I would say a good 50% of my friends who kind of hit a wall, God stock, experience their first failure, sit around and wait for the perfect thing and wake up one, two, three years later and really don't have a professional purpose or a professional source of gravity.

And you know, they're kind of basic stuff, right? Do something in the agency of others, be in service to others. But more than anything, I think the call sign is just now. And that is don't let perfect be the enemy of good and give yourself a certain amount of time to find something. And within that amount of time,

when it elapses, take the best thing that you have. And it might not be, it might not fit to the expectations that you have for yourself or be really exciting or dramatic or really lucrative. But the thing about working is it leads to other opportunities. And what I see is a lot of people who kind of are cast into the wilderness and then come out of the wilderness with no fucking skills. And that is you'd be surprised how much you roll a dux in your skills atrophy.

And so what is the key? Do you want to write a book? Do you want to start a podcast? Do you want to try and raise a fund? Do you want to start a company? What is the key? What is the critical success factor? Is it finding the right people? Is it finding capital? Is it thinking through? Is it positioning the concept? Is it doing more research? No, the key is now. You want to write a book? Open your fucking laptop and start writing. And it's going to be shit.

But then when you go back and edit it, it'll be less shitty. And then if you find someone to help you review it and you find some people, it'll get dramatically even less shittier. All right, you want to start a business? Nobody knows. The only way you have a successful business is you start a bad one and you start iterating. But here's the key, starting. You want to be in a nonprofit. You want to start helping other people. We'll start with one person and see if in fact,

your infrastructure, your skills, your expertise, tangibly change the community, the environment, or their life. What is key to all of this? Three words. First N, second O, third W. I have so many people I run across who are searching, not because they're not talented, not because there's not opportunity, but they're thinking they're going to find the perfect thing. No, find the best thing that is now and get started.

This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Caroline Shagrin. Drew Burroughs is our technical director. Thank you for listening to The Prophecy Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy No Malice, as read by George Hahn. And please follow our Prophecy Markets Pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.