The Former Google Boss Said The AI Killed Him With Nuclear Weapons For War

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, remind the language of AI. (photo: dock. Website Eric Schmidt)

JAKARTA - ChatGPT has recently become a useful tool to help students do their job, making poetry. It can even complete complicated university exams. However, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) behind the chatbot is quite interesting for military purposes.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed in his interview with Wired that AI has the power to revolutionize modern warfare. According to him, the US Pentagon is quite slow in adapting to new technologies and they should step up.

Schmidt, who is Google's boss from 2001 to 2015 and head of parent company Alphabet until 2020, said the US government needed to increase its game radically over AI.

AI could be what it takes to lead those changes. In fact, AI technologies such as drones with sensors, may have the same impact as nuclear weapons in terms of changing the state of war.

"Once upon a time, new weapons, new technologies emerged that changed many things. Einstein wrote to Roosevelt in the 1930s saying that there is this new technology of nuclear weapons that can change war, which is clearly happening. I argue that autonomy (AI power) and decentralized and distributed systems is very strong," Schmidt said.

He stressed that the US needs to improve its AI capabilities by working with big technology companies or the US will fail to deal with China's use of advanced AI.

"We face a very significant challenge from a very, very focused competitor who knows what they are doing," Schmidt said.

Schmidt, who was also a founding member of the US government's Defense Innovation Council in 2016, believes the main obstacle for the US military to effectively use AI is its bureaucracy that is too slow, describing the military as a great human being in a bad system.

That's because it could take months or even years for the US Department of Defense to introduce new technologies.

The US military, Schmidt said, should imitate Ukraine, which quickly started using drones, 3D printing, and a new battlefield system in response to last year's Russian invasion.

Launching the DailyStar, Russia itself has started deploying AIs to the battlefield. Last month, the military superpower showcased its autonomous killer robot tank that could identify and eliminate targets using AI.

Unmanned Marker robots can drive their own miles away and strike targets automatically for up to three days using various smart sensors and robots.