Google chairman blasts "misguided" AI concerns

Google chairman Eric Schmidt has described concerns about the rise of artificial intelligence systems as "misguided".

Speaking at the Financial Times Innovate America event in New York, Schmidt said people shouldn't be overly concerned about automation and the development of AI technologies such as self-driving cars and virtual assistants - leading to job losses.

"These concerns are normal," he said, reported Wired. "They're also to some degree misguided."

Worries about computers and machines taking over jobs traditionally done by human beings have always existed, he conceded, but the move to embrace mechanisation has its benefits.

"Go back to the history of the loom. There was absolute dislocation, but I think all of us are better off with more mechanised ways of getting clothes made," he said.

He also claimed that industries tend to thrive when they switch from man-made processes to machine-based ones.

"There's lots of evidence that when computers show up, wages go up," he explained.

"There's lots of evidence that people who work with computers are paid more than people without."

On a lighter note, he added considerable weight to the "internet is made of cats" theory by revealing the results of an experiment in which 11,000 hours of YouTube videos were fed into an artificial neural network to see what it could learn from them.

"It discovered the concept of cat', he said. "I'm not quite sure what to say about that, except that's where we are."

Schmidt's comments come after Professor Stephen Hawking last week warned that the rise of AI technologies could be the undoing of mankind in The Independent.

"One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand," he wrote.

"Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.

"We are facing potentially the best or worst thing to happen to humanity in history, little serious research is devoted to these issues outside non-profit institutes," he continued.