Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently spoke with a group of Stanford University students about his military drone company White Stork.
The two goals of the company is to “use Ai in complicated, powerful ways for these, essentially robotic war” and to manufacture said robots cheaply, according to the tech guru.
Schmidt nervously rubbed his arm as he said, “Because of the way the system works, I’m now a licensed arms dealer. So, a computer scientist, businessman, arms dealer.”
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that the Russian invasion of Ukraine prompted him to become a licensed arms dealer in order to integrate AI and robotics into warfare pic.twitter.com/WPHga4dwQR
— Tsarathustra (@tsarnick) August 15, 2024
Trying to justify his move into physical warfare, the former Google head told the students, “Now you sit there and you go, why would a good liberal like me do that? And the answer is that the whole theory of armies is tanks, artilleries, and mortar and we can eliminate all of them and we can make the penalty for invading a country at least by land essentially be impossible.
It should eliminate the kind of land battles.”
A moderator asked Schmidt, “Does it give more of an advantage to defense versus offense? Can you even make that distinction?”
He replied, “Because I’ve been doing this for the last year, I’ve learned a lot about war that I really did not want to know. And one of the things to know about war is that the offense always has the advantage because you can always overwhelm the defensive systems. And so you’re better off as a strategy of national defense to have a very strong offense that you can use if you need to. And the systems that I and others are building will do that.”
Lastly, Schmidt explained he’s creating the AI weaponry using a private company “because of the way the laws work” and that he’s doing so “with the help of the support of the government.”