At the Aspen Security Forum (United States), Eric Schmidt, ex-boss of Google, alerted to the dangers of artificial intelligence which he compares to nuclear weapons.
According to him, AI is as dangerous in our modern societies as was the atomic bomb in the 1950s.
It therefore recommends that the global powers, such as the United States or China, to find agreements. It even goes so far as to speak of deterrent treaties as there are today between countries holding nuclear weapons.
Basically, these treaties were born from the Second World War. While the great powers equipped with nuclear bombs as deterrent weapons, agreements were made between nations. Since then, it has been forbidden to carry out nuclear tests without preventing other foreign powers.
According to Eric Schmidt, states should unite to apply a similar policy in matters of artificial intelligence.
He believes that this technology can, in the future, represent a real threat to humanity.
A point of view shared by Sundar Pichai who declared in 2018: “The progress of artificial intelligence is still only in their beginnings, but I consider that it is the deepest technology on which humanity will work and we must make sure that we express it for the benefit of society (…) Fire also kills people. We have learned to control it for the good of humanity, but we also learned to master the wrong sides. »»
Rather than waiting for the authorities to take care of it, Eric Schmidt therefore took (a little) things in hand. Last February, he created the AI2050 Fund. Reserved for academics, it aims to finance “research on ‘difficult problems’ in terms of artificial intelligence”.
Among these “problems”, researchers will focus on algorithm programming biases, technology drifts or geopolitical conflicts.
A first donation of $ 125 million will initiate research.
