#541: Eric Schmidt The Promises and Perils of AI, The Future of Warfare, Profound Revolutions on the Horizon, and Exploring The Meaning of Life

50 years ago, reality was television and normal life. Today, reality is this online world that is constantly demanding attention, constantly full of stressors of one kind or another, constantly demanding your engagement—because that's the way it's built.

I think a fair reading of these AGIs is that, in the most extreme form, they're going to be so powerful that they're going to have to be protected. We don't want them broadly used; they're going to have to be used in specialized scenarios.

I'd much rather have the computer look at my skin rash or my retina in my eye because we now know from many, many tests that humans make observational mistakes (even the best) but computers, when properly trained, don't.

The simplest explanation for AI is it's a system that gets better through learning.

What AI really is is a system of knowledge that is implemented inside the cloud ... It's very good at looking at large data sets and predicting things. It's very good at looking and finding patterns that humans can't see.

If you ask GPT-3 who it is, GPT-3 will say 'I'm a computer,' but it won't give you a philosophical basis for its existence, its purpose, and how its determining where it goes. That is the distinction between AI and AGI, in my view.

China is a couple generations ahead in surveillance. They can actually spot you in your gait now, the way you walk, not just your face recognition.

I am convinced that the secret to longevity is being a workaholic.

We didn't understand, when we invented social media 15 years ago or so, the extraordinary and compound benefits and costs of social media to our society—in particular, our political discourse.

When you talk to people in my world, most people think the singularity will occur 20 years from whenever you ask them that question.

Pretty much every national security issue will be tainted or controlled by AI in the future.

If you think about 200 years from now, to pick a random number, it's probable that we'll know the complete details of the human brain—how it's wired, how it works.

We believe today, from the Reformation, that we have the sole power of understanding reality. But at some point, that’s not going to be true.