“People have a deep mistrust of machines. Have you ever seen Terminator? Or II? Or III? Or IV?” That’s a line spoken by the hilarious Owen Wilson in the comedy The Internship. The movie is about two guys who are not typical internship age who get an internship at Google. It came to mind when Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google) spoke at the Nixon Library this week about his long-term dialogue with Henry Kissinger. After reading their book, The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, it seemed like a good time to talk about – in the One Thoughtful Paragraph – trust in this age of AI-supported healthcare tools.
We are going to trust that these are good ideas:
“Google is a threat to civilization.” Henry Kissinger said that to Google staff several years ago, but changed his mind after becoming close buddies with Eric Schmidt. In 2021, they released The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, a book they co-wrote with MIT’s dean of the Schwarzman College of Computing. In keeping with Dr. Kissinger’s post-Nixon-era life purpose, it was mostly a learn-from-history book. It explains that, during the Age of Enlightenment, there was a shift in how people thought of themselves because of the printing press, which allowed all people to be more informed, not just the educated elite. In his talk this week, Eric Schmidt recalls how the late Dr. Kissinger said that artificial intelligence will change the way we view ourselves. The book, unfortunately, offers no solutions. But it does allow for a moment of reflection about how humans can have an impact over how we interact with this technology – which should be a force for good. If there is no proof that AI will be used for good, there will be no trust in the technology. Are we designing our regulatory oversight of AI to ensure there’s trust? Not so far, and as Eric Schmidt says in his talk, we do not have much time to get this right. Our Enlightenment era is going to be much, much shorter. And yet we are behaving like the recently laid-off salesmen in The Internship. These older guys argue about whether to pursue the internship to compete with much younger and more technically skilled applicants for a job at Google:
[Vince Vaughn’s character]: No, we can’t talk about it later. The future doesn’t know later.
[Owen Wilson’s character]: All the future is, is later. That’s literally what the future is. It’s later. What are you talking about?
