The Chairman’s welcome message at the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Conference
Transcript
Thank you Secretary Perry. Now we will hear from the chair of the National Security Commission on artificial intelligence, Dr. Eric Schmidt.
Thank you, Ili. Representative Stefanik, Kevin McCarthy, Rick Perry, are extraordinarily amazing public service, and we are really, really grateful to have them help us here today. I wanna make sure that I welcome everybody here and say I’m really, really happy we got to this point. We’re halfway through. And I should also note, by the way, I’m speaking for the Commission and not for any particular company you might be thinking about. I wanna say at the beginning so we get the narrative right, that we are unabashedly pro-American as a group. And we believe that we have to win, and that we will win. So, I’m really happy to open this conference on behalf of all my commissioners and what’s interesting is when you look at the Commission’s composition, we have pretty much the top folks in AI and business industry, academia and in ethics. So, somehow, the Congress managed to do this in the right way. And it got the right people together. And we’ve been working hard over the last eight months to get to this point. And I think what we’ve concluded is the US government needs our help, right? The US government is sort of this big thing that sort of moves around. And that collectively we can act and that individually we are not individually strong enough, but as a group we’re extraordinarily strong enough. Now, there are many, many different aspects of AI. Along with Doctor Kissinger, who I worked with for a long time on the future of AI. There are lots of interesting questions about, “What does it do to human society?” “What does it look like to co-exist with “the eventual developments of these technologies?” What we decided as a Commission was not to focus on that, but rather to focus on the shorter term. The stuff that’s in the next five or 10 years. The stuff that will affect our lives in the every day. And indeed, the Commission and the NDA language said that we were given a very specific focus. We were given a focus to consider the methods and means necessary to advance the development of AI, machine learning, associated technologies, by the United States to address national security needs. Couldn’t be clearer. And they wanted, essentially, an outside perspective on what the nation needed to do to ensure our leadership, both internally as well as against various adversaries and so forth. And so, we’re giving you today our initial views of what we need to do. And I wanna say that AI has enormous potential. Most of the commissioners spent most of their time on this, and I think collectively we’re all in agreement on this. And that this potential can shape many, many aspects of our lives. Because the way AI works, it has the unique ability to process information, to provide insights and to alleviate the burden of rote task, the drudgery of human life. And with the right values, which is a key point, it can unlock human potential, enabling individuals to become more effective, to become more capable of achieving their objectives, and to become more able to focus in things that they care about. In other words, it empowers people. And ultimately our nation is about the people who are in it and the strength of our country, which I’m very proud to stand here on the stage to represent. This technology is also a very powerful, not only today but in the future, a very, very powerful tool to ease fundamental scientific advances, which is a really fun subject to talk about. Whether it’s beneficial services to populations in need, it can help with humanitarian tasks, help big issues involving transportation, and agriculture as the Secretary said, and it’s also clearly going to improve our national security because of the DoD and intelligence community work. And you’re gonna hear a lot about that today. Now, we are fundamentally optimists about this. And I wanna state up-front that we live in a dangerous world, China and Russia in particular have concluded that at the state level, the state that masters AI, will accrue tremendous strategic advantages. And they are on record saying this, right? Look it up! So, they’re prioritizing the development of AI across their many, many organizations and the government and institutions and so forth, and they’re clearly making rapid progress. And other nations as well. So, we are in a competition, there’s no question the game has been set, there’s no question this is going on, there’s lots and lots of evidence. I don’t need to deliver the point in the room, but one thing that I will say and I don’t know if it’s true for some of you or not, but most Americans that I have dealt with have an older conception of China. They think of China the way it was 10 or 20 years ago, right? Now, by the way this is seriously impressive, they went from a per capita income of $89 in 1960 to roughly $10,000 per capita, right? Fastest growth in any part of history in the nation. It spends roughly 88% of what the US does on R&D, adjusted for purchasing power, pretty interesting. And these people are smart. And the government has ambitions and specific plans and promising billions and billions of funds to surpass the US in key technology areas. Now, I don’t know about you, but I think about competition and I think about I’ve done this my whole life, I think many of you have as well, “Okay, we got a competitor and we have to deal with it.” And what’s interesting is if you look at the most recent announcements, China has announced its intention to lead the world in a broad swathe of technology. Specifically, quantum communication, I’ll read the list, quantum communication, super-computing, aerospace, 5G, mobile payments, with me? New energy vehicles, high-speed rail, financial technology and of course, artificial intelligence. Including a goal to lead the world by 2030 in this area. The size and commitment that the nation of China is pushing on engineering and science will have a large impact on the United States. And we need to address it directly. So, in that context, the Commission is spelling out a strategy to ensure continued American strength, competitiveness and security. And when you go through the document and you listen, we will show you where the American exceptions are. The extraordinary levers that we have that are unique. And by the way, they’re many, they are not few. But we have to understand them. And whether this is America’s competitive advantages in the private sector, our decentralized ecosystem, which is a benefit, our ability to draw upon the world’s talent, right? As a talent magnet through immigration and so forth. Our system of free inquiry, literally the craziness that we deal with every day, the free inquiry of our nation is a strength, not a weakness. And the risk-taking, that we’ve taken as a country to build the industries that have gotten us to this point will help us against the AI challenge. So, my point is, these strenghts, right? Which we complain about all day. These strengths are the strengths that will give us the competitive edge that we need if we emphasize them, if we focus on them at the political, government, industrial, commercial level. So, what we think now, and you’ll se this in our report, is that America, our government, is unprepared to handle this potential for good or bad. There’s a long list, right, so let’s start with talent. And we’re gonna talk about that. There’s a national shortage of AI talent. It’s particularly severe in the government workforce, right? This is a well-known problem, lots of people working on it, it needs to get addressed like, now. Our national security departments and agencies they need a culture change, right? The old model is not gonna work in this, whether I frame it as global competition or innovation economy, or whatever you wanna do it, it’s not gonna work. And I think it’s time to rethink the way these organizations perceive and approach threats in the age of software supremacy. And by the way, software supremacy, that’s us, right? Let’s keep it that way! But others are coming along. And whether it’s cyber attacks and attacks on infrastructure, everything you all know about, they’re probably gonna play a similar role as physical attacks played in the 20th century, we’ll see. And in particular the DoD, we’re gonna talk a lot about this, needs operational concepts and organizational constructs suited for future battlefields, right? And this again well-established. We just have to do it. Now, our focus here so far has been on the government, but that’s not what I think is our… I’m not trying to exclude the role of everybody else. We have to do this together, the American system requires collaboration, it doesn’t, you can’t have one group do it and everyone else go to the beach. And we have a common belief around American values. The free exchange of ideas, free market economy, free flow of people, these are core American values. We have common interests, right? Including the government development of the workforce, that will manage and create this technology, and a failure to secure our country or even to secure it in the right way, will affect every American, not just the government. So, security is actually important, right? And we should say it right up-front. Which is why we’re here. So, we have to recognize that this is a competition and that we have to win. Okay? Pretty straight forward, we all understand. Now, we’ve got to do some things involving investment, we’ve got to invest in education and enlarging human capital, right? Makes sense. We have to figure out a way to expand public, private sponsorship of R&D. Other countries have terms where they force it or they have specific terms. We have to make this the norm, right? That people are working together and we’ll talk about this at great length. This also means that we have to keep talented researchers from outside the US in our country! Because they’re working on our behalf when they’re here. And we need to open the door for the rest of the world to join and become a permanent part of our tech ecosystem. We need the talent here so they’re not elsewhere. We need to figure out a way to do global technology leadership in the ways that I’ve talked about. The advantage that we have in the use of the English language is not trivial, it’s well worth. And what it takes, what US firms need, in order to win. Put another way, we need to be first, not second. Okay? It’s easy to understand. In global markets and technologies. This report lays out the problem. The next report will have our proposed solutions. Collectively we will come to those solutions. It’s not one of those things where we deliver and then you respond. We have to do this together along the way. And indeed, the Commission has dedicated itself to spending the next year doing that and spending an awful lot of time with people in this room and the people in your organizations to make sure that this stuff actually happens. And by the way, we need to make sure we take concrete steps to lead in things like 5G, right? Quantum computing, financial services and other future markets. We need all of that, AI by itself is not enough. We need the other aspects of the ecosystem. Remember the list I read about what China was working on? They got the list right. So, we need to focus on then, true native AI applications. The ones which are transformative. And by the way, we’re the best in the world at that today. But we also need then to successfully deploy them at scale. Right? That is perhaps at risk, for all sorts of scale reasons, which we’re gonna discuss. And we need these applications to push the boundaries of what we can do and create the new opportunities, which will create new industries, new education opportunities, help solve all sorts of diseases and so forth, in incredibly powerful ways. We need to emphasize our values. Which are openness and our diversity, which are strengths. These are American strengths and we want them to win. And we need to advance our cooperation with our allies. We need the allies that we’ve traditionally had, to help us provide the necessary ecosystem, partners and platform, to deliver on this globally. And the fact of the matter is, that the new trade war is really establishing these global technology platforms that are the key to our continued leadership in this long-term. This is what America is about. And I’ll give you an example, AI-based medical imaging technologies will be invented in the United States because we have the best people. But they will be sold to more customers, more patients, more doctors, globally than in the United States just because the laws of math. So, once you understand that we invent it but we also have to productize it and productize it globally, you understand the value of these American-developed technology platforms. Which are so central to our economic growth. So, there are plenty of examples by the way, where we also need to work with our competitors. Using China as the obvious example, AI-based solutions for global climate challenges, disaster relief, human health. We should for example begin collaborative discussions on AI safety, which is roughly, “I want the AI to do what we said it was gonna do.” Right? That the models perform as advertised. Our final report will offer recommendations to help navigate the trade-off between cooperation and competition. So, for example, are there ways in which some of, I’ll use another example in China, are there ways in which we can use some of the Chinese infrastructure within our own, but make sure that it’s safe? So, this is the nature of our thinking and the approach that we’re taking. So, my challenge to you, and I’ll finish up, is that I think we’ve laid out this morning and you’ll hear all day that the challenge is there, the opportunity is there, America has the resources, we have the people. We have entrepreneurs, the technologists and the academics. And we can’t be on the fence, the security, the preservation of our values, our shared interests. And we have to accept our shared responsibility. Companies, individuals, universities, academics, government, political leaders. And they have to act in support and in defense of both, right? Of what we’re trying to do. Work with the government, providing your expertise and holding them accountable for failures, right? And then helping recognize products. I want you all to participate fully today in any way that you possibly can. We need you as part of our team. And I will say at the end, as Americans, we must win. And I’m absolutely convinced that we will. Thank you very much.