Eric Schmidt says Elon Musk is 'exactly wrong' about AI
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Eric Schmidt says Elon Musk is 'exactly wrong' about AI
Anthony Ha,TechCrunch 4 hours ago
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When former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked about Elon Musk's warnings about AI, he had a succinct answer: "I think Elon is exactly wrong."
"He doesn't understand the benefits that this technology will provide to making every human being smarter," Schmidt said. "The fact of the matter is that AI and machine learning are so fundamentally good for humanity."
He acknowledged that there are risks around how the technology might be misused, but he said they're outweighed by the benefits: "The example I would offer is, would you not invent the telephone because of the possible misuse of the telephone by evil people? No, you would build the telephone and you would try to find a way to police the misuse of the telephone."
Schmidt, who has pushed back in the past against AI naysaying from Musk and scientist Stephen Hawking, was interviewed on-stage today at the VivaTech conference in Paris.
While he stepped down as executive chairman of Google's parent company Alphabet in December, Schmidt remains involved as a technical advisor, and he said today that his work is now focused on new applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
"From our perspective, GDPR is the law of the land and we have complied with it," Schmidt said.
Speaking more generally, he suggested that governments need to "find the balance" between regulation and innovation, because "the regulations tend to benefit the current incumbents."
What about the argument that users should get some monetary benefit when companies like Google build enormous businesses that rely on users' personal data?
"I’m perfectly happy to redistribute the money — that’s what taxes are for, that’s what regulation is for," Schmidt said. But he argued that consumers are already benefiting from these business models because they're getting access to free services.
"The real value is not the data but in the industrial construction of the firm which uses the data to solve a problem to make money," he said. "That’s capitalism."
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/eric-schmidt-says-elon-musk-130208867.html