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The former Google CEO Eric Smith joins us on his latest book, Genesis, Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit. Eric joins us now for more, Eric, Welcome to the program Sir. I want to pick up on that one word hope, and ask you how much hope I should have that this goes right? And start with this quote
from Foreign Affairs magazine. It reads as follows. In cases where some humans might face off militarily or diplomatically against the highly AI enabled state or against AI itself, humans could struggle to survive, much less compete. Such an intermediate order could witness an internal implosion of societies and an uncontrollable explosion of external conflicts. So you've got to calm meet down, Eric. Should I have hope that this plays out?
Well? Well, let's start with and hope that either of your show is incredible. Previous guests talked about two percent productivity. Imagine that productivity goes to five percent a year because of this technology.
So there's every reason to think that there's.
Enormous land businesses, inventions, science, health, and so forth to get invented. But the same is also true for the invention of conflict and war. And if you think about it, it makes absolutely no sense to put somebody in a fighter jet up in the air and have it be shot at by another missile. It makes much more sense for that fighter pilot to be sitting on the ground and having a swarm.
Of the equivalent of those jets.
Let's just call them powerful robots, powerful drones that act in synchrony to achieve the objective of this attacker or to defend yourself. And the future of war is autonomous and networked and AI driven.
This is something that a lot of people have focused on, in particular how the US is going to evolve in this manner, as well as how China is going to evolve in this manner, how they're going to use some of the space satellites to help coordinate that effort. Eric, do you feel like right now one superpower is winning versus the other? What is the best way to gain preeminence in a military AI sphere?
But when doctor Kissinger and I went on his last trip to China, I was convinced from that meeting that China was two to two and a half years behind us. But I am now wrong turns out that in the last couple of weeks, China has brought out software models what are called language large language models that are rivals of the best American ones, which I never thought would be possible. One is called Quinn, another word's called hong Yong. And it looks like they've caught up or they're very
close behind. And it looks like China has decided that it's another part of its industrial policy along with this focus on cellular dominating the battery industry, dominated in the car industry, et cetera.
So they're willing to spend the money.
What's interesting is that it does frame the narrative of China versus the US as the defining narrative.
And one of the more interesting questions, which we.
Discussed at some length in the book, is what happens to the deterrence and what happens to all the other one hundred and ninety five countries that are not China and not the US. These questions are really important because the power of this technology upends society in so many ways, economically, the way we govern, the way we reach language, and so forth, and so on.
So there are a lot of questions within this, and this could be a half an hour discussion, but one of them is who should be financing and who should be leading the national efforts to gain pre eminence in this sphere. And you have to wonder, you talk about China as a state organized, state funded type of effort that is coordinated in that manner, how should it be directed in a place that does consider itself capitalist like the United States.
Well, the Chinese model is what is called civil military fusion, where they subsidize their biggest companies. No one in America, not even in the companies, thinks that the thinks that the largest American companies need to be subsidized. But let me make an argument that if general intelligence, that is, human intelligence, is to be invented, it should be invented in the United States and under control of Americans and
the American government. And I don't mean managed, but I mean under the legal control of our country and our citizens at our democracy and getting there first is a big deal. A number of us have talked for some time that there should be ANAI for America initiative where the government works closely with the private companies and figures out a way to make sure that we are ahead of ahead of time.
In truth.
However, the financial industry that you all invented, for which we are incredibly grateful, has been incredibly generous in terms of the ability to fundraise the billions of dollars that are required, and id state by the way that you guys have done such a good job in raising money, and we've done such a good job in actually getting the computer scientists around the world and the data and so on and so on. What we now need is energy. We are prolific consumers or energy, and we're going to
run out. One estimate is that US will run out of all sources of energy by twenty twenty eight at our current growth rate.
There's another topic you discussed in this book, which is to check AI.
How can that work? What do you think about it.
One of the things that happens is in AI systems is you have compositional generations. What happens is you take one piece and another piece and you interlick them and they've never been linked together before, and it looks like when you combine those two.
You get emergent properties. Right, So that's in and of itself interesting.
So the question is what is the limit of that how far can can that system go up? I think it will get there, and I think that it's probable that we can build systems that are the technical term is super intelligent, where you have a simple system, sorry, a single system that is at the nineteh percentile of physics, math.
Chemistry, and arts and so forth. No human can do that.
It looks like these systems will be not only available in the next five years because we already have examples of passing these tests already, but also that they'll be broadly available for all of society. That has huge implications. We've never had an experiment where each and every one of us has a polymath, you know, the Einstein type
scientists at our back and call. And furthermore, that scientist whatever you want to call him or her or it, is capable of writing code, doing agents, and making things happen.
How do you think the United States competes with China when we have an incoming administration that wants to put up tariff walls, and even this administration who's been putting export controls on some of our high tech semiconductors.
I am not in favor of broad tariffs.
I never have been I'm the son of an economist and a grandson of an economist, and tariffs are essentially taxes. What I am in favor of is restrictions or limitations for strategic reasons. It's really important that we win in this race against China. And so the things that the Trump administration Biden administration to limit, for example, hardware access, were really smart. And I know because I was part of a commission that recommended it way back when in fact was adopted.
Great job.
So the question here is ignoring the tariff question, which I just don't like, and I think this is just another tax. How do you control how do you control and limit what China does? And how do you amplify what America does? And you sit there and you go, well, you're doing pretty well, right. Everybody's making a lot of money. There's all this growth, and video is doing well. All the tech companies are doing well. But let me explain
what happens. You have a slope that's like this, and it keeps going up and up and up with humans. At some point, the industry believes that there will be AI scientists, that is, non human scientists, and he or she who gets there first gets a slope like this and all of a sudden boom.
Yeah right, we're really really growing fast.
These network effect businesses are what we do in our in our competitive environment against each other under a US regulation.
I want that to be true globally for.
The US, Eric, I can tell you we're all in favor of having your back soon to continue the conversation. Congratulations on the new book, so we appreciate your time. The former Google CEO Eric Smith