Speaking at the TIME100 Leadership Forum in Singapore on Sunday, the technologist, entrepreneur, and co-founder of philanthropic foundation Schmidt Futures said “you don’t need to worry about the killer robot.” It makes for a good movie, but “we’re not building that, right? It’s not happening.”
However, he is concerned about the misuse of artificial intelligence to help build things in the real world. “I believe that algorithms will appear over the next five or so years that will allow you to stitch together very, very bad viruses, ” he told TIME Executive Editor John Simons. The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the social and economic impact of a global health crisis. In the wrong hands, Schmidt warned, such capabilities could engineer something much worse.