Eric Schmidt held senior posts at Google and its parent company Alphabet from 2001 to 2017
The former chief executive of Google is worried artificial intelligence could be used by terrorists or “rogue states” to “harm innocent people.”
Eric Schmidt told the BBC: “The real fears that I have are not the ones that most people talk about AI – I talk about extreme risk.”
The tech billionaire, who held senior posts at Google from 2001 to 2017, told the Today programme “North Korea, or Iran, or even Russia” could adopt and misuse the technology to create biological weapons.
He called for government oversight on private tech companies which are developing AI models, but warned over-regulation could stifle innovation.Mr Schmidt was head of Google when the company bought Android, the company which now makes the most-used mobile phone operating system in the world.
He now supports initiatives to keep phones out of schools.
“I’m one of the people who did not understand, and I’ll take responsibility that the world does not work perfectly the way us tech people think it is,” he said.
“The situation with children is particularly disturbing to me.”
“I think smartphones with a kid can be safe,” he said, “they just need to be moderated… we can all agree that children should be protected from the bad of the online world.”
On social media – where he has supported proposals for a ban on children under 16 – he added: “Why would we run such a large, uncontrolled experiment on the most important people in the world, which is the next generation?”
Campaigners for limiting children’s smartphone usage argue phones are addictive and “have lured children away from the activities that are indispensable to healthy development”.
Australia’s parliament passed a law to ban social media use for under-16s in 2024, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese saying it was important to protect children from its “harms”.
A recent study published in the medical journal The Lancet suggested that mobile phone bans in schools did not improve students’ behaviour or grades.
But it did find that spending longer on smartphones and social media in general was linked with worse results for all of those measures. -BBC
