Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt has said the Ukraine war has turned him into a licensed arms dealer, a career path he “does not recommend”. Mr Schmidt’s new venture aims to bring together AI and defence technology to help Ukraine in its ongoing war against Russia.
Mr Schmidt reportedly gave a lecture at Stanford University in April in which he spoke about how Russian atrocities in Ukraine affected him. “Watching the Russians use tanks to destroy apartment buildings with little old ladies and children in them made me mad,” he said.
Mr. Schmidt, who was Google’s CEO from 2001 to 2011, is working with Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun on a new startup called White Stork. “The basic idea is to do two things – use AI in complex, powerful ways for these essentially robot wars, and secondly, bring down the cost of the robots,” he said.
According to a report by Business Insider, a lecture delivered by Mr Schmidt at Stanford in April was posted by the university on its YouTube channel last week. The lecture instantly went viral, however, it was later taken down.
In the lecture, Mr Schmidt reportedly explained that White Stork will mass-produce drones equipped with artificial intelligence to identify targets, eliminating the need for ground combat with tanks, artillery and mortars.
In a clip of the lecture, now widely circulated on X (formerly Twitter), Mr. Schmidt says, “The whole principle of armies is tanks, artillery and mortars. And we can eliminate all of those, and we can make it essentially impossible to invade a country, at least from the ground.”
Mr Schmidt said he is now a licensed arms dealer “because of the way the system works”. “A computer scientist, businessman, arms dealer. I wouldn’t recommend including that in your career path, I would stick with AI,” he said.
“Because of the way the law works, we’re doing this privately and it’s all legal with the support of the government, so it goes straight to Ukraine and then they fight the war,” he said.
The Russia-Ukraine war which began in February 2022 has been going on for almost two-and-a-half years now.
In the latest development, Ukrainian forces attacked Russia’s Kursk region destroying a third bridge. According to Ukraine, the ongoing offensive in the Kursk region is aimed at creating a “buffer zone” and bringing the war closer to an end.
Ukraine’s ongoing offensive in Kursk is being called the biggest attack on Russia since World War II.
