Video -- Machine learning: What it is and why it matters.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has once again urged people not to be worried by alarming predictions about artificial intelligence by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
"I think Elon is exactly wrong", Schmidt said at the VivaTech conference in Paris.
"He doesn't understand the benefits that this technology will provide in making every human being smarter.
"AI and machine learning are so fundamentally good for humanity, it makes every citizen smarter from the best educated to the least. It allows you to live longer, with less pain, less disease. It allows you to make economic systems and social systems be more fluid. Over and over again, making people smarter is a net good."
However, Schmidt added: "He is concerned about the possible misuse of this technology and I am too."
Schmidt has previously also played down[1] concerns about AI one day overrunning humanity as complete fantasy, highlighting that Google's current ambitions were to put an assistant in everyone's hands.
At the time, he suggested Musk's worries about Google AI specifically should be treated with a grain of salt because he's an engineer, not a computer scientist.
But Schmidt is convinced, despite concerns raised by Google employees[2] against its involvement Pentagon's Project Maven, that the benefits of AI outweigh the risks and will help spawn new industries, solve employment shortages and generally do good.
Schmidt offered this analogy[3]: "You would not invent the telephone because of the possible misuse of the telephone by evil people. No, you would build the telephone and you try to figure out a way