Eric Schmidt

It's called the kill ratio, and that drone costs retail $5,000, $4,000.

The American tank costs $30 million.

You can send an awful lot of those drones to destroy those tanks.

The likely evolution goes something like this.

So first, people learn that drones are like rifles and like artillery.

So it's more efficient to use drones now than to use mortars, grenades, artillery.

That's clear.

If you just look at the economics, economics in terms of cost or effectiveness as it's called.

The next thing that happens is that both sides develop drone capabilities, which is what you're seeing now, and each then becomes a war of drone against drone.

So you have drone against anti-drone.

And so then the shift moves to how do you detect the enemy drone and how do you destroy it before it destroys you.

So the doctrine ultimately is the drones are forward and the people are behind.

And I've seen operations in, for example, sitting in Kyiv, where the Ukrainians are commanding things over Starlink, I might add, in the distant war, and they're very, very effective.

So we've solved the latency problems, we've solved the timing problems, and so forth in that area.

The ultimate state is very interesting and I don't think anyone has foreseen this.

If you go back to our conversation about RL and planning, which is what you're seeing with AI, let's say that we're on one side and we have a million drones and there's another side over here that has another million drones.

Each side will use reinforcement learning AI strategies to do battle plans.

but neither side can figure out what the other side's battle plan is.

And therefore, the deterrence against attacking each other will be very high.

Today, the way military planners operate is that they count weapons.