This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic from Bloomberg Radio. Well, our audience is very familiar with our next guest. He was the CEO of Google for a decade as well as executive chairman. He's a philanthropist. He's also the co founder of Schmidt Futures, and he's the he's the co author of a new book. It's called The Age of AI and Our Human Nature. Eric Schmidt joins us now on the phone from New York City. Eric, how are you? Um, thank you and
I'm great. I'm so glad to see things going so well in the market. Yeah, I mean it's it's wild at six, the sixth day of record or sixth day I should say higher in a row for the SMP five hundred. Uh. Hey, let's talk about the book and the Age of AI and Our Human Future. You co wrote it with Henry Kissinger as well as Daniel Huttenlocker, the inaugural dean of the M. I. T. Schwartzman College
of Computing. Explain how this book came about. Well, Dr Kissinger when he was in college, which was before all of us were born seventy five years ago wrote his undergraduate thesis on Kant and content invented this whole theory of whether objects were real or how did we perceive them? And he had been interested in how virtual worlds would emerge, although he couldn't articulate it the way we do it today.
And when he visited Google and then subsequently talked to some of the AI folks, in particular a guy named Demostatibus, he realized that we're busy building the world that he thought about, but we're building it as technologists and without the basis of any kind of philosophy. So he set out with myself and Dan and a few others to kind of think through how do we address these technologies.
And we concluded, and this is the headline, is that this change in the next five to ten years is the beginning of an ethical change in human history, similar to the Age of Reformation, where the age of reason excuse me, where we went from the age of faith where people basically just believe that whatever God said was correct versus the notion of having reason, and that the world where we're going to have ourselves and then inanimate non human intelligence is helping us is a very different
world than the one we're in today, and bridge the gap between the world we're in today and the world we're heading into where AI is a bigger part of it. Because you know, when I think about a I I struggled to think about how it will transform my day to day life. So if we go down that path, you know, five, ten, even more years into the future, I mean, how do you see this shaping the world around us? Well, most people when they think about are
they think of a killer robot. I wasn't going to say that, but yeah, yeah, yeah, we're not talking about that. What we're talking about is that you will have assistance. Today, you have an assistant in the form of Google UM, you have recommendation engines and so forth. Those are all AI powered by the way that you translations and so forth.
That all works very well. What will happen in the next five or ten years is you're going to have conversational systems that are human life that you're can ask questions and can make recommendations and more importantly, generate new things UM. In our book, we talk about the h the achievement of AlphaGo, where computers developed new game strategies for a game that have been played by humans for two thousand private or years, that had never been discovered
by humans. We highlight the discovery of a new antibiotic. They could never have been done without using superhuman supercomputer analysis with human collaboration to look through all the choices to find a new antibiotic that saves that saves lives. And we also talk about these new language models, which are these immense systems where we build them and that we don't know what they know and what they really think. And it's called GPP three. These are the beginning platforms
of a transformation of our the world around us. So the answer for you, specifically your report, Uh, you're you're in the news, You're inundated with information. Everyone is going to be pushing more and more stuff to you. You're gonna be inundated. You're gonna need a digital assistant. It will help you prioritize what you what you need to do in your work as well as your whole life. Okay,
that sounds better than a killer robot. Absolutely, So to that end, you write in the preface along with your co author, is that the three of you differ to the extent in which you're optimistic about AI. Where do you fall in that? Of the three of us, I'm the more most optimistic, I think because in my world and my experience, we've we have these enormous opportunities with
enormous down side, and somehow we muddle through. Um. If I told you the social media would become the primary attention source and information source for the most of the world, you'd say, great. What I didn't realize when we did social media it would also be used to manipulated elections and manipulate people through falsehood and misinformation and so forth. Um, we're working on the ladder. So when this next generation of much smarter systems come along, we better have a
notion of what their ethics are. What are they promoting When you put one of these things with your kid who's obviously developmentally vulnerable. What happened If the thing has a hidden bug in it, like it's slightly racist, or it has the wrong values. What's all that says something inappropriate? Do you really want your child exposed to that in such an important role where this is the child's best
friend because they rely on them. This is an experiment in human existence that we have are now running that we've never run before. We've never had a technology that was both imprecise, dynamic emergence and learning. It's learning while your kid is using it. Well, let's get right back to Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO and chairman, also the co founder of Schmidt Futures. He's also the co author, along with Dr Henry Kissinger and Daniel Hutton Locker, of
the Age of AI and Our Human Future. Eric, I want to talk about the metaverse and the context of last week's rebranding of Facebook. Now Facebook is known as Meta Platforms, Inc. Mark Zuckerberg said last week it's now a metaverse first company. Indeed, if you open up Instagram now, it says instead of saying Instagram by Facebook, it says Instagram by Meta. What is the relationship between AI and the metaverse? Well, the metaverse needs to be defined, you know.
As you know, the term was coined by Neil Stevenson in a famous science fiction book. And most of us think that the metaverse is a world where sort of similar to the movie Ready Player, one where you would move into a digital world that's everyone's smarter, more beautiful, faster, it's more fun and it's really enjoyable. Facebook has not built that product yet and so we have to assume
that that's their direction. But it seems to me that naming the changing the name of all of Facebook, which is a hundred thousand people in an enormous business based on products have not been announced yet, is a pretty big decision. And we'll see, let's see how the products play out. Yeah, I can't wait to see how that plays out at Facebook now. Meta and I love the movie Ready Player one. I don't know if I would want to live there though, but it's interesting following this
announcement from Meta Facebook. I mean, you've seen Microsoft detailed their plans for the metaverse or their ambitions there. Uh Nividia Sword today after Wells Fargo said that there's an opportunity for that company in the metaverse. Is this a new buzzword? I mean, are we going to see every company trying to jump on this bandwagon? Well, I think I would rather have them go back to Hype AI
because AI is to transform their businesses in an enormous way. Um, what I think of as a meta versus something very interesting and very powerful. It's a natural next step. Um. I've been involved in various projects associated it for more
than thirty years. Perhaps it's time has come. UM. I was in the media last night where one person said that that what will happen is Facebook will use its significant cash and engineering resources to build this world using its identity services and so for and so on, but that there will be a competitor set of metaverses that will be based on technology known as Web three, which is the crypto platform, which has different different economics, different
power structures, different leaders. I think we don't know who the leaders are going to be. What's exciting about this metaverse idea once again the marketing ahead of the reality, is that it's another example of how the industry moves forward. In our book, we spent an awful lot of time talking about this new set of platforms that are being built in AI and their impact on society. The metaphors.
If it is successful and if we understand ultimately understand what it is, UM may have huge impact on our education systems and the way we live and so forth. It doesn't mean Facebook will be the leader, but probably somebody will be the leader in that space. Well speak of Facebook in the wake of Facebook's brand too meta platforms.
A lot of commentary is focus around the Facebook brand and the idea that it's under scrutiny from Democrats and Republicans over what it did in terms of censoring or not censoring content are promoting hate speech on the platform. Our audience is very familiar with the articles that came out as part of the Facebook papers recently. Eric, I'm curious because you're widely viewed as coming in as the quote adult in the room when it came to Google. I'm wondering if if Facebook needs an adult to come
in right now. Well, in fairness to Mark and his team, they're now proper adults. Maybe they were, you know, young when they were founding the company, but they've they've earned the right to drive in the way they are. I think we can debate their decisions. One way to understand the problem in social media is you want to maximize revenue, and by maximizing revenue, the best thing to do is to maximize engagement. By maximizing engagement, the best way to
do that is with outrage. So guess what you get more were outrage Because outrage drives drives attention. Attention drives revenue, and the companies are seeking that, and then the AI systems are optimized for that. You shouldn't be surprised we got what we got. Um When I was CEO of Google, we faced similar choices that we made a decision, which was a collective decision that we would take some of the games to revenue, but some of it to quality.
That's a different company's decision. If I were doing Facebook today, I would have a hard decision in front of me, which is I want to improve the quality of my users experience and frankly, peddling misinformation and manipulating people is not a high quality outcome. It got to figure out a way to address that. They don't. They will eventually face some form of regulations. Eric Schmith, thank you so
much for joining us on Bloomberg Business Week. His new book, The Age of AI and Our Human Future, co written with Henry Kissinger and Daniel Hutton Locker. Eric Schmidt the co founder of Schmidt Futures and former Google CEO and chairman