Another former Google chief has issued an apocalyptic warning about artificial intelligence – saying it could ‘endanger’ humans in five years. 

Billionaire Eric Schmidt, who served as Google’s CEO from 2001 to 2011, said there were not enough safeguards placed on A.I and it was only a matter of time before humans lost control of the technology.

He alluded to the dropping of nuclear weapons in Japan as a warning that without regulations in place, there may not be enough time to clean up the mess in the aftermath of potentially devastating societal impacts.

Speaking at a health summit Tuesday, Schmidt said: ‘After Nagasaki and Hiroshima, it took 18 years to get to a treaty over test bans and things like that. We don’t have that kind of time today.’

Schmidt previously believed it could take 20 years before AI poses a danger to society such as discovering weapon access, but that timeframe now appears to be fast approaching, Schmidt said at the Axios AI+ summit in Washington, D.C.

 He counseled that the only way to combat this kind of inevitability is to set up an international body similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to ‘feed accurate information to policymakers,’ who can push the urgency of regulating AI and will enable them to take immediate action.

Schmidt is the latest former Google staffer to warn about the repercussions of AI, joining ex-Google engineer Blake Lemoine, former chief business officer Mo Gawdat, computer scientist Timnit Gebru, and of course, the Godfather of AI himself, Geoffrey Hinton. 

Hinton, who is credited with creating and advancing AI, said he left Google in April so he could warn people about the dangers of the imposing technology.

 ‘I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,’ Hinton told the New York Times.

He spoke on the bias and misinformation spurred on by AI, and said the rapidly developing technology may create a world in which many will ‘not be able to know what is true anymore.’

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