Misinformation Is About to Get So Much Worse
Editor’s Note: This article is part of our coverage of The Atlantic Festival. Learn more and watch festival sessions here.
For years now, artificial intelligence has been hailed as both a savior and a destroyer. The technology really can make our lives easier, letting us summon our phones with a “Hey, Siri” and (more importantly) assisting doctors on the operating table. But as any science-fiction reader knows, AI is not an unmitigated good: It can be prone to the same racial biases as humans are, and, as is the case with self-driving cars, it can be forced to make murky split-second decisions that determine who lives and who dies. Like it or not, AI is only going to become an even more omnipresent force: We’re in a “watershed moment” for the technology, says Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO.
Schmidt is a longtime fixture in a tech industry that seems to constantly be in a state of upheaval. He was the first software manager at Sun Microsystems, in the 1980s, and the CEO of the former software giant Novell in the ’90s. He joined Google as CEO in 2001, then was the company’s executive chairman from 2011 until 2017. Since leaving Google, Schmidt has made AI his focus: In 2018, he wrote in The Atlantic about the need to prepare for the AI boom, along with his co-authors Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, and the MIT dean Daniel Huttenlocher. The trio have followed up that story with The Age of AI, a book about how AI will transform how we experience the world, coming out in November.
During The Atlantic Festival today, Schmidt spoke with Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic’s executive editor, about the future of AI and how to prepare for it. Their conversation below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Adrienne LaFrance: For decades, we’ve been waiting for artificial intelligence to catch up with our imagination. And now the technology really is advancing incredibly rapidly. How different do you think life will be a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now as a result?
Well, we think
