Dmitry Chugunoff

Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, offers a sobering view: The biggest technological shift in human history is happening, and almost no one is talking about it. Schmidt opens with a startling industry prediction: "We believe as an industry that in the next one year the vast majority of programmers will be replaced by AI programmers. We also believe that within one year you will have graduate level mathematicians that are at the tippy top of graduate math programs." He explains why this matters so much. Programming and math aren't just two fields among many: "Programming plus math are the basis of sort of our whole digital world." And the AI labs are already using AI to build better AI: "The research groups in OpenAI and anthropic and so forth… around 10 or 20% of the code that they're developing in their research programs is being generated by the computer. That's called recursive self-improvement." @ericschmidt then lays out the timeline most people haven't grasped: "Within 3 to 5 years we'll have what is called general intelligence AGI which can be defined as a system that is as smart as the smartest mathematician physicist artist writer thinker politician." He gives this belief system a name: "I call this by the way the San Francisco consensus because everyone who believes this is in San Francisco it may be the water." But the truly unsettling part comes next. Once AI starts improving itself, humans become optional to the process: "The computers are now doing self-improvement… they don't have to listen to us anymore. We call that super intelligence or ASI… computers that are smarter than the sum of humans. The San Francisco consensus is this occurs within six years." And here's where Schmidt sounds the alarm. The conversation isn't keeping pace with the technology: "This path is not understood in our society. There's no language for what happens with the arrival of this. This is happening faster than our human that our society, our democracy, our laws will address." His closing thought captures why this matters: "That's why it's underhyped. People do not understand what happens when you have intelligence at this level which is largely free."