Dr. Eric Schmidt: The Future of Technology at 300 — Transcript

Dr. Eric Schmidt discusses AI's impact on future warfare, US-China tech competition, and Ukraine as a testing ground for drone and AI-driven combat.

Key Takeaways

AI-driven drones are revolutionizing modern warfare, making battlefields more transparent and lethal.
Ukraine serves as a real-world testing ground for AI and drone warfare tactics.
US-China tech rivalry is accelerating, with China rapidly advancing in AI and chip technology.
Controlling technology diffusion is challenging due to software workarounds and broad diffusion efforts by China.
Sustained US innovation and strategic investment in AI and space technology are essential for future security.

Summary

Dr. Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO and chair of SCSP, speaks on AI's role in transforming warfare and technology innovation.
Ukraine is described as a laboratory for future war, showcasing the tactical use of AI-powered drones in combat.
The drone war in Ukraine demonstrates a transparent battlefield where AI-enabled drones target enemy supply lines and personnel.
AI and automation are reshaping combat by enabling simultaneous multi-azimuth drone attacks, making traditional armored warfare less effective.
Dr. Schmidt emphasizes the human cost of war while highlighting technological advancements on both sides.
The US-China competition in AI and technology is intense, with China rapidly closing the gap in AI capabilities and chip technology.
Efforts to control chip exports to China have had mixed success as China develops new software to bypass hardware restrictions.
The future of warfare will heavily rely on AI, robotics, and drones across air, land, and sea domains.
Sustained innovation and investment in AI are critical for maintaining US national security and technological leadership.
Dr. Schmidt’s recent role as CEO of Relativity Space ties into his broader focus on space and AI-driven technological races.

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To discuss the technological trajectory and strategic implications of AI, the future of America's innovation power, and changes in warfare, please welcome Dr. Eric Schmidt, chair of SCSP, and CEO of Relativity Space, in conversation with Tom Shanker, director for the project of media and national security. Uh, thank you so much and good afternoon, everyone.

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project of media and national security. Uh thank you so much and good afternoon everyone.

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Um, it's my great honor to moderate this discussion with Dr. Eric Schmidt. There are few people who've shaped the technology landscape of the last half century and are still shaping for the future as our speaker Dr.

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Schmidt. He led Google from a promising startup to one of the most consequential companies in history. He then chaired the Defense Innovation Board and the National Commission on Artificial Intelligence. In 2021, he co-founded and endowed the Special Competitive Studies Project, our host

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Schmidt. He led Google from a promising startup to one of the most consequential companies in history. He then chaired the Defense Innovation Board and the National Commission on Artificial Intelligence. In 2021, he co-founded and endowed the Special Competitive Studies Project, our host

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he brought to the race for the internet and AI. And guys my age only have one um audio visual aid. I wore this of the cosmos, Dr. Schmidt, just to honor your work in space. So, thank you.

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today for this important panel. Uh, in his spare time, he's written extensively, a number of books, uh, on all sorts of things, most recently Agenda AI. And in March 2025, he became CEO of Relativity Space, bringing the same energy to the race for space that

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from Ukraine making another of your valuable trips. On the topic of AI here today, Dr.

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he brought to the race for the internet and AI. And guys my age only have one, um, audio visual aid. I wore this of the cosmos, Dr. Schmidt, just to honor your work in space. So, thank you.

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thank you all for being here. This was an experiment that Illy came up with, and I said, "Well, you know, it'll probably work." And it's worked enormously well, and I want to thank Illy and the entire team putting this

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Um, thanks for all you've done here, for your time today. There's so much to talk about, but I wanted to start with the headlines, which is the drone war, Strait of Hormuz, Ukraine. And I know you're just back

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Uh we we want to make America safe and powerful and keep it that way for many, many decades. To answer your question, uh I spent lots of time in Ukraine. I have a company there. Um and I spent

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from Ukraine making another of your valuable trips. On the topic of AI here today, Dr.

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And I think now we're seeing there So, it it's important to understand that Ukraine is the laboratory for future war. Uh I'm not in any way endorsing this war. It's a horrible war. I've seen plenty people die. It's just horrible.

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Schmidt, at the tactical level, what do you see as the future of the marriage of AI and drones? And then strategically, how is AI going to reshape the face of combat? Um, so first thing, Tom, thank you for it for doing this. I want to

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foxholes. The minimum number of days they spend in the foxholes is 50, 5 0.

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thank you all for being here. This was an experiment that Illy came up with, and I said, "Well, you know, it'll probably work." And it's worked enormously well, and I want to thank Illy and the entire team putting this

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That's what a transparent battlefield looks like. And I don't think we Americans understand this. I think almost no country understands that that's what the future of drone war means. Um the result of this is that it is the the front is largely frozen. It's

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event on. Uh, we're committed to national security. We're committed to working with the government. We're committed to working with you who work with the government.

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Uh in Ukraine, they've recently announced that they've hit their fourth month of killing their quota of Russian targets, which they say is 35,000. To give you an an an idea of the scale of this war, it's hard for us to understand. Think about

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Uh, we, we want to make America safe and powerful and keep it that way for many, many decades. To answer your question, uh, I spent lots of time in Ukraine. I have a company there. Um, and I spent

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And the consequence of this this this thing is anything that moves is destroyed. So, get rid of your tanks, armored personnel carriers, uh artillery, flamethrowers, all the fun stuff that you see in movies, right?

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lots of time on the front lines, uh, which is not for the faint of heart.

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That technology is getting stronger on both sides. So, this is the future. The battle now has moved to the mid-strike area, which is roughly 40 to 100 km. And that's where the supply line on the other on the enemy side is,

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And I think now we're seeing there. So, it, it's important to understand that Ukraine is the laboratory for future war. Uh, I'm not in any way endorsing this war. It's a horrible war. I've seen plenty people die. It's just horrible.

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slowly beginning to respond successfully. You asked about AI. Um if you take the the principle that I described, which is that basically uh air, land, and sea drones are going to be the way that this that is um code for robots and automation and

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Horrible, horrible, horrible. Uh, having said that, it's important to understand what's going on. Uh, today, the flood, as it's known, is quite wide. That's the actual line demarcating the two sides. Um, and the people who are on that area are in

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a number of drones and you hit it simultaneously and most targets do not have the ability to simultaneously in a 360 azimuth defend themselves. So, that's roughly where we are.

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foxholes. The minimum number of days they spend in the foxholes is 50, 5 0.

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Schmidt, the US and China. How will this influence how we should both prepare and deter war and fight if required? And I have to ask the former journalist question, who's ahead?

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But in many cases, it's up to 3 to 4 months. How do they survive? Drones supply them with water and food. If they stick their head out of the ground, they're killed.

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A week ago, China released Deep Seek V4. And when I was working on the National Security Commission for AI, we worked really hard with Trump 1 and Biden to implement hardware controls for chips.

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That's what a transparent battlefield looks like. And I don't think we Americans understand this. I think almost no country understands that that's what the future of drone war means. Um, the result of this is that it is the, the front is largely frozen. It's

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It looks like the policy has worked, but it's largely beginning to not work. The Chinese are clever, they're smart.

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very hard for either side to go against the other. And people take enormous risks running along the fields, hiding under trees, and so forth, while the drone hunters are hunting them. And it's just horrible to watch.

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they've invented new software ways to get around the various latency and architectural problems. Um what I like about this is that we have real competitors. What I don't like about it is China is very focused in broad diffusion of this technology

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Uh, in Ukraine, they've recently announced that they've hit their fourth month of killing their quota of Russian targets, which they say is 35,000. To give you an, an, an idea of the scale of this war, it's hard for us to understand. Think about

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Um so I think a fair statement is a year ago I said I thought that they were 1 to 2 years behind. It looks like they've caught up enough that the most recent analysis is China's within 6 months,

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the number of people who we lost in Vietnam in the context of, of what's going on in Ukraine. The Ukraine numbers are not released, uh, but it's substantially lower than 35,000.

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Um if it makes you feel any better, in order to do this, you have to have a whole country of, you know, engineers, scientists nerds money hardware and so forth. There are not going to be many company countries that can do this on

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And the consequence of this, this, this thing is anything that moves is destroyed. So, get rid of your tanks, armored personnel carriers, uh, artillery, flamethrowers, all the fun stuff that you see in movies, right?

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how would you tell the American leadership to deal with AI? What's the left and right guardrail? What's the role of private sector and how do we build consensus? So so so let me say some some uncomfortable facts, which I think are true and if you

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It's sort of over. Um, replaced by these powerful robotic systems. Technically, the way they work is they, uh, can work without GPS, they can communicate through electronic warfare.

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Um we build an enormous number of tanks, ships, missiles, uh human-powered jets, driven jets, etc.

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That technology is getting stronger on both sides. So, this is the future. The battle now has moved to the mid-strike area, which is roughly 40 to 100 km. And that's where the supply line on the other, on the enemy side is,

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So the conclusion you come to if you sit in my position is we should be focusing our national security on automation of land, sea, and you know, air and so forth. Uh we have fantastic military, very, very smart people. We should be

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supplying these people who are unfortunately in the foxholes. And that's where the bombing is, and that's where the war is largely being fought right now. Um, and Ukraine is slowly, uh, is pretty much stopped Russia's advance, which is extraordinary, and is

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different things. So, for example, why would you build artillery for 155 piece, these big 155 things, which are completely untargeted and only go about 15 km?

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slowly beginning to respond successfully. You asked about AI. Um, if you take the, the principle that I described, which is that basically, uh, air, land, and sea drones are going to be the way that this that is, um, code for robots and automation and

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can swarm them and so forth and so on. So, so as a matter of military doctrine, I think all that stuff that we learned watching the you know, the courage of the Marines in Iwo Jima, you know, all

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AI. Um, they will all be interconnected. They will all operate in the equivalent of swarms and they'll all operate in what are called coordinated attacks. So, a typical example is you'll have a target and you'll surround the target by

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strongly support. I helped write it. Um and I feel very, very strongly that this is the direction that the nation should take.

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a number of drones and you hit it simultaneously and most targets do not have the ability to simultaneously in a 360 azimuth defend themselves. So, that's roughly where we are.

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And I'm in mourning because I started as a programmer when I was basically 13 or 14. And that is essentially over.

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Thanks. That's on the battlefield there. If you think about that as a Russia-Ukraine competition, add in Dr.

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And what's happened I'll I'll give you an example. Uh So, the way programming is done at the state of the art now Is a programmer wakes up, goes to the office uh cuz they're social and they sit there, but they don't have that many

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Schmidt, the US and China. How will this influence how we should both prepare and deter war and fight if required? And I have to ask the former journalist question, who's ahead?

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And they set them up with objective functions and they watch what they wrote they the code that they write.

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So, it's a, a slightly different subject would be on AI. They're all interrelated, of course.

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So, then they go back to the office and they do this and then it's time to go home to see the family and so forth and they set up an objective function of this is what I want you to do and

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A week ago, China released Deep Seek V4. And when I was working on the National Security Commission for AI, we worked really hard with Trump 1 and Biden to implement hardware controls for chips.

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So, they've gone from writing code which is what I did and I thought I was the hottest thing ever when I was like 20 and I'm sure that wasn't true, but welcome to being 20 to now having this kind of power. And

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We were very successful collectively, all of us, to limit hardware access to China. And I was strongly in favor of this policy as were many people.

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And if you're writing code in any traditional way, stop. Right? It's over. And go and if you manage a company and you have software programmers say, "Why are you still writing code code the way you did it 6 months ago?"

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It looks like the policy has worked, but it's largely beginning to not work. The Chinese are clever, they're smart.

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forth. You saw for example this huge sell-off in software as a service stocks, essentially software traditional software stocks. That's because the market decided that those products would literally go away, which of course is not true. They're probably oversold, but the they're directionally

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Um, and they have now built systems that are within striking range of the top models in America, but with much, much less powerful hardware. The technical summary is that they use a chip called the Ascend chip. It uses a slower process and

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For the young people here, what should they do? Study plumbing or what? So, what what it says is that the traditional writing code, you know, like if then else, the stuff that I used to do, you're not going to do that anymore.

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they've invented new software ways to get around the various latency and architectural problems. Um, what I like about this is that we have real competitors. What I don't like about it is China is very focused in broad diffusion of this technology

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Do you remember two or three years ago there was this whole thing about hallucinations and we couldn't trust these systems and they were off, you know, falling in love with the the therapist and things like that. That's largely under control. Uh I can sit in a

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globally and it's all open source, which means it's largely uncontrolled and not controlled in any way by us.

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But that's the change. So, you learn the new programming, if you will, is learning how to manage the programming tools. You've gone from building the house to becoming the architect and the builder is under your control.

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Um, so I think a fair statement is a year ago I said I thought that they were 1 to 2 years behind. It looks like they've caught up enough that the most recent analysis is China's within 6 months,

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the very tippy-top programmer was worth 10 times what the next level was. Um it's similar in if you think about football salaries or NBA salaries, their productivity was so great.

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which is a nanosecond, right, in our world. So it gives you a sense of how committed China is to the AI leadership position and they're not going to stop.

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so interesting. Thank you. I want to return to national security. You talked about missiles and bombers and all of that. I'm old enough to remember the missile gap with the Soviets, the bomber gap. Is there any kind of an AI

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Um, if it makes you feel any better, in order to do this, you have to have a whole country of, you know, engineers, scientists, nerds, money, hardware and so forth. There are not going to be many company countries that can do this on

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What does that do to deterrence and stability? So, there's a Again, let me give you a bit of the background. Um AI went from language to language to language to action.

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their own, but China's clearly one, America's another one with our allies, of course. Maybe there'll be a third or fourth. And as we look not just in national security, but to how this country's dealing with AI from A to Z,

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That technology is emerging very, very fast. Um those require an enormous amount of training data.

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how would you tell the American leadership to deal with AI? What's the left and right guardrail? What's the role of private s

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And one of the emergent behaviors of these things is they could begin to do planning.

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So, somehow they learned how to do planning. So, you can say uh again, it's called chain of thought reasoning.

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Um you can say, "Show me the steps to do something." So, all of that is pretty well assembled.

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The next thing is prediction. And these models are very good at predicting things. So, in war, for example, you do predictive battlefield analysis. I want to know what happens if I do this, what happens? Very reasonable. The same is true in a

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company or government or whatever. It's not unique to the military. The next one is called reinforcement learning, and that's a simulation task. And that's how we would, example won the the game of Go at Google, which was thought to be

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incomputable. That's how something called AlphaFold was done at Google, which is a Everyone won Nobel Prizes for that.

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The ability to understand how proteins fold is a very big deal. This technology is generally available now if you have the data.

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So, if you want to do the kind of stuff you're talking about for a national security reasons, you have to have a great deal of training data. The only place I have found that has enough training data is inside of Ukraine. And

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shockingly, Ukrainians will not release it for obvious reasons. I'm joking. It's highly classified. You can't get to it for all sorts of very good national security reasons. So, for America to win in this particular area, we're going to

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have to have lots of training data. One way to get that is by doing things like we have in the cage outside, where you basically have drone competitions.

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Um, and I think my guess is that our military ranges will ultimately have drone-on-drone competitions with live fire, and that's how the training will occur. I know you've been thinking a lot about one of the critical enablers of

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AI, which is energy. The huge amounts of electricity that will be needed. Do you see the need for what? More wind, solar, small modular reactors? How do we power the AI future that is undeniably coming our way? So, um

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just one more thing on energy for the national security. So, our military has now, which is great, has now figured out they need real classified data centers. And so, they've started looking at how to partner with the commercial

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sector and so forth in this way, and I think this is wonderful. We're not going to be safe without our government having its own very, very powerful data center, something which they've never really had. Um, and when I was working for the

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Secretary of Defense and we're on the Ash Carter stage, so I'll always owe Ash a lot for getting me involved with this.

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There was essentially none. So the military now has a plan to do this. This is very welcome.

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In general, you're going to read Let's go through this sort of what you'll read in the press.

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The AI boom has contributed between 1 and 2% of the GDP of America. That's a very big number.

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For most of you, you're going to say, "My God, these people are idiots." I mean, how could you possibly waste all that money? That's not my view. I think that the AI revolution is under hyped, not over hyped. This is my opinion.

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And I started one of a number of data center businesses to study this and to build data centers.

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And I can tell you roughly what you conclude. First, the interconnection grid is not going to survive all of this new power. There's not enough switches, there's not enough wires, there's not enough management.

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The interconnection queues, as they're called, are are very long one. So what people are now doing is they're building data centers in remote places with their own power plants. The technical term for that is behind behind behind the meter.

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What they do is they build essentially air-cooled data centers of enormous scale. You've seen the pictures. They're essentially air air-cooled systems. They don't use as much water as you think.

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The only water they use is internal for internal transfer. Very little water escapes. But they use a lot of electricity. And they're measured in megawatts. The largest data centers are in the 1 and 2 gigawatt stage, and there

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are people talking about A gigawatt data center costs something on the order of 50 billion with a B number.

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How could these people in my industry be so crazy to raise all that money and build all the centers and the answer is they see the demand.

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And if you the my industry has changed so that if you want to make more money, you need more servers cuz the servers are how you make the money cuz that's the reasoning. So absent an AI breakthrough algorithmically, which is a

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change to what is called the transformer architecture which is invented at Google, thank you, in 2017, um we're sort of stuck with this cost structure.

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So my own opinion is you're going to see a lot of remote America build these behind the meter power plants that takes forever to get the turbines and all of that. And I think the real limit to AI is not energy, it's

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actually cash. Because when you add up the cost of these, if you take 50 I'm just round numbers, 50 billion a gigawatt, so 10 gigawatts is half a trillion dollars.

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How many companies, countries, and so forth can hand an industry a trillion dollars of capital? Very, very few. The Chinese could certainly do it. I don't know if they're doing it. I'm going to try to find out. In the America, there

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are people who hope that's going to happen. It's interesting that you can finance these things.

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Because the the the the brilliance of the American capital market allows us to borrow that kind of money. So for example, the Europeans can't do this, right, which they're sort of sore about.

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But this is good for America. Mhm. So interesting. Of your many very valuable books, my favorite is the one you co-authored with Henry Kissinger. I recommend it to everyone. Kissinger, of course, made a career of looking at the

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world and deciding if it was organized along values, geography, military necessity, trade. As you look to the future, Dr. Kissinger's not here to ask, do you see the world, Dr. Schmidt, redrawing the map along AI alignments?

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The Chinese model, our model, energy providers in in the Gulf, will AI redraw the map of the world?

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Well, you know, Henry was my closest friend. And so I miss him, you know, every day. And I don't know how to bring him back.

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Uh The empty chair is for his spirit. Yes, he would be He would be very helpful now in the Iran crisis, for example. He understood all that very well.

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And um Henry was very concerned about competition between America and China in AI. That it would somehow unleash an unstable situation.

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And he felt very strongly and started a so-called track two dialogue, which continues uh with the Chinese.

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And the the concerns have I'll give you an example. If you look at Methuselah, which is the Anthropic model that's so powerful, uh we collectively believe that Methuselah is just the first of a set of very powerful models that have the

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ability to, for example, do cyber attacks. And this is not a desirable thing. It's desirable if you're in offensive cyber attack mode, but it's certainly not desirable uh if you're on a company or or in the military and so forth.

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And so you have to to think of it in the following way. You have these enormously powerful models uh coming out.

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How many will there be? Well, there's four or five in the US. There's at least three powerful ones in China. There'll be a few others. Let's say there's 10.

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How do you want to organize the world? Can you have meetings where every all the players agree to limitations?

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And the concern goes something like this. Um you and I are on opposite sides, which we would never be, and we agree.

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But then I build something which you know I'm doing, and it's really good. And I'm going to get a significant advantage by undercutting you, by by running ahead of you, by violating our agreement.

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Uh it sounds a lot like OPEC, Right? So, we've not We don't have language among the countries yet on how to handle this. The Trump administration has figured this out and wants to start working on this, which I think is very welcome.

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And we'll see. The general issue of global instability is actually more even more serious than that. Mythos is just a good example that everybody's familiar with.

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But the Chinese models are open-source open weights. So, for example, this means that if you want to take deep seek V4 and you want to add powerful capabilities and you're evil, which none of you are, uh and I'm not suggesting the Chinese

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would do this, but somebody could do this. Some evil person exists in the world. How would we know that? How would we police it? How would we see it?

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At least with the uh American models, the big ones are under corporate control, proprietary, we know who to call, the military can call, the police can call, and so forth. But if you release this stuff open-source, it's dangerous enough

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that a a lone actor, a new kind of terrorist could emerge. Obviously, we want to avoid that. And we want to And we want to acknowledge it's possible and we want to get ahead of it. And it requires multi-stakeholder agreement.

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Hm. Well, for all of us insomniacs, you've given us more reason to lose sleep at night. Um I have enough questions to fill the day, but we always love to hear what's on the mind of of the audience. Um if you will raise your

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hand and I'll uh we have about 10 minutes to for questions. Uh anyone? Uh yes, please. Standing here.

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Hang on. There there there's a microphone coming. Yeah, we'll have to get the mic so everybody can hear.

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Oh, you followed Okay. Um I'm curious to hear uh Dr. Eric Schmidt's opinion on things like UBI, universal basic income, and like Elon Musk likes to call it universal high income. How do you think the future of that will look if we ever

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get to that stage with AI? So, the tech industry is full of people who pontificate on this stuff, and they're not trained in economics, they're not trained in social sciences cuz they didn't have time to take those classes.

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They were too busy programming. Um so, first place, maybe we should ask people who have actually studied this.

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So, my in talking to economists who have studied labor economics and so forth, the argument goes something like this.

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Um the power of AI in terms of efficiency is so great that companies will adopt it, and the companies themselves become more profitable and bigger.

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And although there's plenty of internal disruption, so it's painful, the fact of the matter is the company gets bigger and the economy grows overall. That has been true basically for 200 years, and it's been true forever.

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So, the first question is, do you think that that will continue? And I do.

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And I think that what will happen is we'll have a shortage of job of people for jobs because the economy will grow so quickly because of the productivity. That's the optimistic view.

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The accelerationist view is a stronger version of that, which is that things become so inexpensive that we can all sit around on the beach, uh and things like that. I think my own view, and again, this is conjecture, is that's

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probably unlikely. And the reason is, in the at least in the American system, uh we love lawyers fighting lawyers, we love watching sports teams, we love We're not going to be sitting around uh drinking mai tais and so forth on the

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beach. We'll just engage in a higher level of competition. Um and I think that that will provide plenty of employment. Uh there's lots of evidence. So, many, many people blame AI for stuff. When you You at the actual

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job losses, there's two categories. The first is mine, right? There's no question that if you are a young software person entering the software field, it's harder to get a job for the reasons that I stated. The other one are

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low-end or low-paid customer service workers. If you think about it in 10 years, they'll probably be a lot more.

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Right? But it's it's much slower than people think. I don't spend my time worrying about this question.

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That's very helpful, thanks. Yes, right here in front. This is Yes, ma'am. Here it comes. The microphone is coming this way.

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Oh, hello. I'm Dr. IG, private sector. Could you please put it up? I have a question. One of the things that I hear within the field of AI with the people working on AI is that everybody talks about a human-centered

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AI. Yet, when we go at the technical level, that falls or is not at all.

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So, and I believe that one of the reasons is because most of the people that are building AI are engineers, coders, programmers, and so on.

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And now think people are really thinking that we need to bring all the humanistic humanic aspects, all the brain science, cog science, psychology into the AI during the entire cycle of building AI, training, and so on, and creating the

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algorithms. So my I have noticed that big companies like Google, DeepMind, correct me if I'm wrong, now they have jobs for psychologists, cog scientists. Is this is becoming a reality? I would like to hear your opinion on that. Thank you. So, you're

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exactly right, and thank you for making this point. So, in our books, Dr. Kissinger and I basically said it's AI is too important to leave it to people like me, right?

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Who have a technical background. We need the great philosophers, um the the the sort of humanists, if as you will.

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Um they are beginning to show up. And the reason is the human the humanists produce graduate students.

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And this is the most interesting thing for a graduate student in humanities to work on is the impact on their field in psychology or or government or political science or whatever of these powerful set of tools. So, I think we're in we're

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getting in better shape. The companies use the word human alignment to refer to both values and safety. The first one is they have a set of tests. So, for example, if you say to any of these models, how do I kill

Speaker A

myself? It will say, "Don't do it. Call a suicide hotline." That's added It by the way, it learned how to kill yourself, but it's suppressing that answer. That's a good thing.

Speaker A

The second question is more subtle, which has to do when you're talking to it, what's its style, what's its communication, what's its value, and that's trained.

Speaker A

Um the rhetorical question is, do we all agree on what human values are? I suspect with this audience, we probably are in favor of Western liberal values, which includes um uh rights of women and minorities and uh broadly speech, the ability to express

Speaker A

yourself, and so forth. Well, what happens if the Chinese models are trained in a different way and they take over?

Speaker A

And because of open source, it's reasonable that the majority of the models in the world, because it's open source is just cheaper, will be Chinese resident, not American resident. Now, there are American values ones being built. Um there is a debate about which ones are

Speaker A

coming. I'll give an example today, um, there's a something called Gemma 4 from Google, which is obviously have American values. There's something called Nemo Tron from Nvidia, which has a similar values. There's a couple of startups coming up with better ones. I'm very

Speaker A

excited about those. But, when you say human values and alignment, you have to decide tell me which ones. I like the US ones.

Speaker A

It's marvelous. Thank you. Uh, yes, a question almost to the back, the gentleman raising his right hand here.

Speaker A

Yes. I'm coming. A microphone's coming to you sir. Thank you. Um, my name's Kevin.

Speaker A

How do we prevent another Twitter files, um, and I want to get trust back in science, and the um COVID lab origin, we, you know, with Peter Daszak, and Ralph Baric, and she's in the Why can't AI say yes, Peter Daszak was a bad actor,

Speaker A

and we're going to correct, uh, rogue scientist, rogue, kind of dangerous gain of function experiments, and we'll have better confidence next pandemic.

Speaker A

Um, I only could hear about half of your words. I I'm sorry. So, so Francis Lee wrote a book called In COVID's Wake. She said, "People don't trust science or news because we got gaslit in the COVID I understand.

Speaker A

Um, let's start with some basic facts, and it's Washington, so you have to start with actual facts.

Speaker A

Um so Thank you for that. So, science and technology innovation is the cause of American greatness over hundreds of years.

Speaker A

The innovation that America has led brought us to this extraordinary power around the world.

Speaker A

And it's really important that science remain non-partisan, focused, well-regulated, and funded. Um I've committed my own I've made lots of money from Google thank thank goodness and all that money will eventually go into science in one form or another. Our

Speaker A

military security depends on science. This AI future depends on science. So I start with a science statement. With respect to the specific questions that you are describing which have to do with misinformation, that's not a solved problem because if you think about it, if people

Speaker A

are willing to pay more for things that scare them than things which are long and reasonable, then we have an economic misalignment. In other words, the the CEO of that vendor is has an incentive to not be completely

Speaker A

truthful. And that's the that conundrum exists in every democracy. But I think the most important thing for this audience is to say regardless of your political views and so forth, if you want our country to be great, which we

Speaker A

all do, and you want us to grow, you have to invest in the kind of stuff we're doing. I'll give you an example.

Speaker A

The gains that we're going to see in America from the application of AI into science and medicine in the next 5 to 10 years, typically done by graduate students and postdocs, the faculty supervised, but it's really that sort of

Speaker A

young cohort is phenomenal. The breakthroughs that we're about to see in energy, uh quantum uh various quantum effects, um in in literally chemistry and how bonds work together. If I told you that as a result of these discoveries,

Speaker A

everything fell going back to the earlier abundance question, everything you purchased was twice as powerful, half the price, and so forth, you'd be a pretty happy citizen. That's all within our reach, and I'm not even talking about healthcare.

Speaker A

Um and the gains in terms of drugs, uh Demis Hassabis and I were talking. He started a company, and he their goal is to solve all disease within 20 or 30 years. Wow, that's a pretty good goal. Sign me up

Speaker A

for that. And and what do you have to do? You have to invest in science.

Speaker A

Thank you. I think we have time for probably one more very fast question. Yes, the gentleman right right here.

Speaker A

And sir, I'm going to ask you to be really brief if it's okay. Uh as a country, what do we need to do prepare our university, high school, elementary students to participate next 5 10 years? What a perfect ending question.

Speaker A

so um let's think about us an a 17 or 18 year old. I think people here look like you have kids, or maybe grandkids in some cases.

Speaker A

What's their life going to be like? Their entire lives will be mediated by this new form of artificial intelligence.

Speaker A

Um they'll be their friend, they'll be their psychologist, they'll be their advisor, they'll be their programmer as we've already discussed. My career is over.

Speaker A

Um what's the most important thing to teach them? Is to use those tools. So, my proposal, to be very specific, is that every university in the nation have a mandatory class that's in freshman year, which is how to

Speaker A

use these tools. And I'll design one. It starts off by learning how to use the power of them, and it ends by building a system that grades your your friends in a way that promotes you. Yeah, or pick

Speaker A

some that makes sense to an 18-year-old student. And you sit there and you so what a conservative proposal. You should do this in high school. Yes, let's do it in college first to catch all the people who didn't get it in high school and

Speaker A

then move it into the high schools. But uh I'll give you an example. Um in my military work, I'm working with a 20-year-old at Stanford who is not graduated yet. And I hired him and I told him that the only rule he has is he has to

Speaker A

send me a picture of him graduating from his university with his parents. Right? That's the deal.

Speaker A

Cuz he's so good. He He skipped all those other steps and he's now doing essentially reinforcement learning around swarming.

Speaker A

Now, this is the future. I want to capture those people and I want to get them I want to get them to be early successful.

Speaker A

And I'm sure that the power of these tools is so great that we can address a lot of the complaints that young people have today about their lives, about their economic opportunities, their reach, and so forth. And plus, it's fun. Right? The

Speaker A

reason I got into this when I was so young, and I grew up by the way in Virginia, and my father got me a teletype, and off I was going, is I As a young person, I like to make things.

Speaker A

These are the most powerful tools you could imagine to make things cuz you can design almost anything. Right? Including bad things, which hopefully you'll teach people not to do. So a very So and universities are resistant to this cuz

Speaker A

they still want to teach in the old way. But that's going away. And the new model is going to be having professors teach students how to ask a creative question, not a rote learning question. When I was in Virginia, by the way, when I was in

Speaker A

seventh grade, I was required to memorize the names of all of the counties of Virginia, which were like 50. And I managed to do it.

Speaker A

Why in the world is that kind of thinking still around? Right? When these systems are always available, they're so powerful and they can be used for this extraordinary analytical capability. They need creative juices, they need oversight.

Speaker A

That's what we should be teaching for anything. Thank you, Tom. No, thank you for Thank you for ending on such an optimistic note. Thank you all. Thanks to SCSP for hosting us. And Dr. Schmidt, thank you not just for all you've done for our

Speaker A

country, but for explaining it so clearly. you. You're very kind. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. It's great to see you.

Topics:Eric SchmidtArtificial IntelligenceDrone WarfareUkraine ConflictUS-China CompetitionNational SecurityTechnology InnovationRelativity SpaceDefense InnovationFuture of Warfare

Frequently Asked Questions

How is AI changing modern warfare according to Dr. Eric Schmidt?

AI is enabling drones to conduct simultaneous multi-directional attacks, increasing battlefield transparency and lethality, which is transforming traditional combat tactics.

Why is Ukraine considered a laboratory for future war?

Ukraine's ongoing conflict showcases real-world use of AI-powered drones and automation in combat, providing insights into future warfare dynamics without endorsing the war.

What is the current state of US-China competition in AI and technology?

China has rapidly closed the AI and chip technology gap with the US, developing new software to bypass hardware controls, making the competition intense and ongoing.

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