During the RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francisco, Eric Schmidt expressed his concerns regarding the future of AI. He believes that the industry should come up with various ways to persuade governments to stop militarizing the internet using machine learning technologies.
Its Primary Purpose
The Alphabet executive chairman basically wants to preserve the main purpose of the internet, which is to promote interconnectedness. He says that machine learning capabilities shouldn’t be conducted in military research labs, but out in the open.
Schmidt reveals that if the military research labs did start developing the internet, the rest of the world would have to worry about their privacy, which would lead to its early demise. He begs the industry to think of ways to prevent the use of machine learning technologies in the military.
The Political Agreement
He shared that this is not really an impossible feat to achieve. At the end of his administration, President Obama agreed with President Xi of China to cease their incessant cyber attacks against each other. He emphasized how critical it is to get the governments to approve of the benefits of open internet.
Schmidt even acknowledged his apprehensions about the possibility of countries blocking interconnectedness and openness online. He fears that the danger of cyber attacks could lead to limited access eventually.
The Benefits of Free Access
Schmidt says that if the research was done in public, it could change the negative perception of the public towards AI, as well as, the varied outlook of the engineers. Everybody will be more aware of its great advantage towards society, especially with computer vision. He even claims that the awareness would reduce societal difficulties, including the medical system’s poor diagnoses and traffic accidents.
With this information shared, he urges the industries to find a way to convince the government to publicize AI Research, instead of the alternative.