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Eric Schmidt, for one, welcomes our new robot overlords

And Facebook’s CTO ... AI?

The technology world's top executives gathered in New York this week to pay homage to the enormous benefits artificial intelligence will deliver to the world with nary a word from the Google chairman about the obvious and immediate existential threat it poses.

Eric Schmidt told a conference in New York that he desires his own AI assistant, which shall be dubbed "Not-Eric", according to Bloomberg. The Google man also had kind words for artificial technology, praising its ability to deliver the world from some of its ills.

While current developments in AI are unlikely to see a Skynet-style computer creation declare war on humanity, the ability to automate complex data analysis has a tremendous capacity to accelerate the search for solutions to what the CEO described as "hard problems," by which he reportedly meant things like "population growth, climate change, human development and education".

Facebook's CTO, Mike Schroepfer, concurred, telling attendees that "the power of AI technology is it can solve problems that scale to the whole planet".

As opposed to Elon "I invest only to monitor the threat" Musk, Schmidt would not only welcome our new AI overlords, but is actively ushering them into existence with Alphabet/Google expenditure. Research at Google declares itself to be "at the forefront of innovation in Machine Intelligence, with active research exploring virtually all aspects of machine learning".

Schmidt said "every single advance has occurred because smart people got in a room and eventually they standardised approaches. The promise of this is so profound that we – Alphabet, Google, whatever our name is at the moment – are working incredibly hard to advance these platforms."

While there is only "a small set of people" in Eric Schmidt's AI-welcoming vanguard, the chairman stated that they "understand collectively that when we put all this stuff together we can build platforms that can change the world". ®

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