“Watching the Russians use tanks to destroy apartment buildings with little old ladies and kids just drove me crazy,” Schmidt, who founded a drone startup, said
Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google said that his new drone startup intends to help Ukraine, according to a Business Insider report, which describes White Stork, his company as aiming to create AI-driven attack drones.
Now former Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt speaks at a promotional event for the Nexus 7 tablet in Tokyo. (Reuters/Kim Kyung-Hoon)
“Watching the Russians use tanks to destroy apartment buildings with little old ladies and kids just drove me crazy,” Schmidt said at an April Stanford University lecture.
“Because of the way the system works, I am now a licensed arms dealer,” Schmidt said. “A computer scientist, businessman, arms dealer.”
However, “I do not recommend this in your career path, I’d stick with AI,” he added.
What does White Stork do?
He had said at the lecture that he was working with Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun on a company that will “use AI in complicated, powerful ways for these essentially robotic wars.”
White Stork works to mass-produce complicated drones at lowered costs that use AI to identify targets, eliminating the need for ground battles with tanks and other artillery.
With “the support of the governments,” he said the drones would go “straight into Ukraine” and “fight the war.”
Schmidt had also previously chaired the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence for multiple years. He was the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011.
