“These concerns are normal. They’re also to some degree misguided,” says Eric Schmidt, Google chairman, on fears that machines will take over the world. He’s not into doom and gloom, he wants to talk loom: “Go back to the history of the loom,” he said. “There was absolute dislocation, but I think all of us are better off with more mechanized ways of getting clothes made.”
Eric Schmidt wants you to know that robots are your friend. That makes sense, considering that as chairman and former CEO of Google, Schmidt has been heavily involved in the development of some of the the world’s most sophisticated artificially intelligent systems, from the self-driving car to Google’s predictive search engine. The company even recently launched its own internal robotics lab. But while Schmidt admits sitting shotgun in the self-driving car is not an “altogether happy” experience (read: it’s terrifying), he also believes that all the fear of machines stealing jobs and taking over the world is unwarranted.
