Bilawal Sidhu

Hey, I'm Bilawal, the tech curator for TED 2026.

Hopefully you enjoyed that conversation.

I mean, look, drones can be scary.

We see them on the battlefields of Ukraine.

We also see them as toys and tools of entertainment.

But there's actually a very useful function for this technology to go where people can't go or go faster to a place before people get there.

And that's this whole idea about drone as first responder and drone as like, you know, essentially infrastructure monitoring.

Like we got these crazy fires in LA, like that could have been prevented if we had drones that were surveying power lines and infrastructure that, you know, clearly, you know, caused that blaze.

But again, like most things, this technology is very dual use.

And that's why we want to have these conversations.

You ought to know about what the technology is capable of, how it's being used in every facet of society, so we can have the discussion about what we want to do with it.

I hope you enjoyed.

Eric Schmidt, thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

You said the arrival of non-human intelligence is a very big deal.

What did you see that the rest of us might have missed?

If you fast forward to today, it seems that all anyone can talk about is AI, especially here at TED, but you've taken a contrarian stance.

You actually think AI is underhyped.

Why is that?

I mean, speaking of just the sheer compute requirements of these systems, let's talk about scale briefly.