Eric Schmidt: The Implications of Superintelligence

**Eric Schmidt** (0:00)
My own view is that the AI boom is under-hyped because people do not appreciate, although it seems crazy, these tools should be powerful enough to materially change the essentially productivity curve of humans at a scale that we've never seen before, more than, for example, clean water and electricity. So the arrival of a new intelligence is a very, very big deal for humans.

**Mike Maples** (0:28)
That's Eric Schmidt, best known as the CEO who helped transform Google from a promising startup into one of the best businesses in human history. But Eric's story doesn't end with search. In recent years, he's become one of the most important voices in the global conversation about artificial intelligence, helping leaders make sense of what's coming and why it matters. This is Mike Maples Jr of Floodgate, and it's Go Time with Eric Schmidt. This is Mike Maples Jr and welcome to the Pattern Breakers podcast, where we explore why some founders radically change the future and how they stand apart. Together we'll learn about the counterintuitive mindsets and actions behind their remarkable success. Brace yourself for a world where chaos is welcome, naysayers are often a positive signal and movements galvanize misfits who transform the impossible to the inevitable.
Eric Schmidt doesn't just help build the future, he interrogates it. In The Age of AI and Genesis, co-authored with Henry Kissinger, he goes beyond examining what AI can do, and he asks what happens to human judgment when machines produce knowledge we can't explain? What becomes of dignity, diplomacy and democracy when intelligence is decoupled from morality? In our episode, Eric explores how AI is transforming human agency, global stability, and the very nature of innovation. From personal super intelligence to geopolitical risk, this conversation dives deep into the moral, philosophical, and strategic stakes of AI's rise, and what it means for the future of humanity. Let's catch up with them. Eric Schmidt, welcome to the podcast.

**Eric Schmidt** (2:35)
I'm so happy to be with you, Mike.

**Mike Maples** (2:37)
I'm excited that you would take the time to do this because I've been spending a lot of time on AI, like a lot of folks, and you've written a couple of pretty interesting books on it that I've devoured, both The Age of AI with Henry Kissinger and Dan Huttenlocher, and then Genesis with Henry Kissinger and Craig Mundy. So I think it'd be good to just talk about the circumstances of each book, what caused you to partner with these people, and what you were trying to convey with each book.

**Eric Schmidt** (3:07)
You know, it's interesting that for some interesting reason in my life, I guess, I ended up being best friends with Dr. Kissinger over 15 years. And when he first heard Demis Hassabis speak about AI, a light bulb went off in his brain because he had worked on Kant when he was an undergraduate at Harvard before any of us were alive. And he saw the parallels of the impact of this technology on humanity. Combining my strengths, Henry's strengths, and then Dan and Craig made perfect sense because we wanted strong technical people, as well as policy people, and plus, obviously, the greatest diplomat alive at the time. That's what drove those. And what's interesting is that Dr. Kissinger Henry spent his time really accepting that AI was going to happen and what would happen to society. And our industry, you're very much a part of this, often invent things without understanding the secondary impacts on society. And it's generally agreed that social media has had deleterious effects that were not foreseen when social media took off 15 years ago, and that we collectively did not see them coming. My idea with these books was to say, let's see what's coming and try to get ready for it. And I'm more convinced than ever that at the rate of innovation of artificial intelligence, society will change quite rapidly well ahead of where the governments, the laws, and the sort of moral principles really are.

**Mike Maples** (4:41)
I've felt this a lot that one of the positives about tinkering is that the tinkerers tend to get to decide what's going to happen in the future, right? Like the aeronautics experts didn't get to decide what planes were going to be and when they were going to happen, a couple of guys in Kitty Hawk did, a couple of bicycle mechanics tinkering with this stuff. But one of the challenges of that is that not that many people I know in the technology industry are very philosophically grounded. Not many people in the tech industry studied Kant or Sartre or Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas or some of these people throughout history who've really had some powerfully profound ideas about what the meaning of life is, and what a good life is, and what ethics are, and those types of things. And so I'm curious if there are philosophers that have resonated with you that would be valuable for people in the technology industry writ large to understand, right, as part of their ethical grounding, as they think about building the future.