The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
The Risks and Opportunities of an AI Future — with Eric Schmidt
Thu, 21 Nov 2024
Eric Schmidt, a technologist, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and Google’s former CEO, joins Scott to discuss the dangers and opportunities AI presents and his latest book, Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit. Follow Eric, @ericschmidt. Scott opens with his thoughts on Netflix’s bet on live sports. Algebra of happiness: don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Buy "The Algebra of Wealth," out now. Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the main insights from Eric Schmidt's book on AI?
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 a 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 genie is out of the bottle here, and we face a very real issue or fulcrum or tension, 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 about and gets ahead of us on this technology. How do you balance that tension?
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Chapter 2: What are the potential dangers of unmanaged AI?
So 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 of the 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 an AGI 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 U.S. law would require. U.S. 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, And 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 an example, a worry that we all have is exfiltration of the models. I'll give 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 going to shoot you.
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Chapter 3: How could AI impact human relationships and loneliness?
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, 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 nuclear, our Nazis are smarter than your Nazis kind of thing, that we like, we don't want a multilateral treaty because we see advantage. And 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 U.S. 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 place, I think that the short-term threats are from rogue states and from terrorism. And because there, 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 U.S. with our 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, and in some cases exceeds the one from Meta, which they use every day. It's called Lama 3, 400 billion. I was shocked when I read this because I had assumed that our, 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 U.S., if they're malevolent, and do that.
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Chapter 4: What solutions can mitigate the risks associated with AI?
That if China and the US came to an agreement around what they were gonna do or not do and bilaterally created a security force and agreed not to sponsor proxy agents against the West or each other, that we'd have a lot, that would be a lot of progress. That might be 50, 60, 80% of the whole shooting match is if the two of us could say, we're gonna 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 was 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 very much a realist about China as well. His view would be at odds today with Trump's view and the U.S. government's. The U.S. 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 codependent, 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.
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Chapter 5: What role should regulation play in AI development?
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 your Rolodex and 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?
Well, 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 Burrows is our technical director.
Thank you for listening to the Property 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 Property Markets Pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.
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