Biological threats, misinformation among AI’s risks, says ex-Google CEO

[SAN FRANCISCO] The creation of dangerous pathogens and spread of misinformation are among the near-term risks of artificial intelligence (AI), said former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, adding that the technology is set to be regulated for significant dangers.

“The simplest way to frame it is that there are scenarios of extreme risk, and these systems are going to get regulated around extreme risk… I’m talking about thousands and thousands of people harmed and killed from something,” he said in San Francisco on Thursday (Jun 29), at the Data + AI Summit organised by software company Databricks.

AI systems could be used by bad actors to “accelerate at scale”, said Schmidt. “If you sit down with Google long enough, and you understand enough about biology, you can probably get to a bad pathogen. These systems make that somewhat more likely. So we have to think about that.”