Eric Schmidt, welcome to Inside Defense. I'm glad to be here. I am delighted to be having this conversation with you, particularly here in Kiev, Ukraine. You will be known to most of our viewers as one of the fathers of the modern Silicon Valley. You're a former CEO of Google. You're now a mentor and investor in some of the leading lights of the AI revolution, but you've also long been a leader in innovation to national security, and you've played a very outsized role here in Ukraine. You've built and scaled a drone company. You've gone frequently to the front lines. On this trip, I went to visit the command headquarters of Nemesis, which is one of the drone brigades in Ukraine. It's the subject of another insider show we've done. And I have to say, you see, you get a glimpse of the future of war and it's pretty dystopian.
War is really bad. And now I've seen it, it's much worse than you think it is. If you've been watching war movies, to watch people really be killed, really struggling, the death and destruction of a city, little old ladies being killed by the Russians, it's just horrible. The goal should be to stop it. The only way I know of to stop an aggressor is to fight back. And these new technologies have both offensive and defensive versions of each other. Russia and Ukraine are together in this unfortunate pairing inventing that future.
And I had always thought that until recently Ukraine had the advantage in innovation, but you wrote recently in the Washington Post, it was very sobering, that you were more worried than at any time since the earliest days of this invasion. You said Russia was going towards a strategy of quote total war and that that was blunting Ukraine's innovative edge. Can you explain what you meant by that?
Well, I've been doing this for more than three years. And I've watched the Ukrainians work really, really hard to innovate and they've held the line largely well at great cost to themselves. It's always been presumed that Ukraine was the innovator and Russia was big and slow and something changed. Russia is now on an innovation path at a slope, if you will, of improvement that's similar to that of Ukraine, but with much more resources. Here are my data points. We have no effective way of handling the ballistic missiles that they're using. And indeed, the anti-ballistic missiles, generally known as Patriots, in the West are in such short supply that there's not enough to go around. And I understand that. If you look at jet Shaheds, Ukraine, sorry, Russia invented two things and put them together which I can describe separately which has made jet Shaheds that are roving around the country the major killers of things that are not on the front line. There's a talk of a large mobilization which will be more human fighters on the Russian side against Ukraine very hard to fight against. There's going to be a new satellite network in the air that's similar to Starlink, it's called Rusevet sometime next year. And finally, the Russians are building these very powerful so-called glide bombs, which are independently targeted and are keeping the front line from moving and really destroying a lot of people. It's any one of those Ukraine could overcome. The five is going to be, in my view, almost impossible without Western help. And the Western help, to be very precise, is they need money. Russians have now shut down all of their commerce, all of their ports. They need money. Literally money.
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And second, they need help on scaling. They have the courage to win that is or hold the fight, but they don't have the capability of scaling.
Yeah, I hear that loud and clear, but let's just dive down into some of those specifically. So jet Shaheds, you know, the Russians took the Shahed drone, Iranian drone that they now make in huge numbers and added jet propulsion, which as I understand it means they go faster and higher and much harder to intercept. How close is Ukraine to a solution to that?
There are at least five companies in Ukraine that have come up with solutions that are in test now. It should be soon. But this was a major event in the war and I didn't fully foresee it which I hold myself responsible. We knew that the Russians were going to take their Shaheds, make the back stronger, add these small jet engines which you can get from China. We thought they were going to use about 10% of the supply and we thought that that was overcomeable. Russia accelerated the use of these to more than half of the Shaheds. But they did one other thing. They don't have access to the equivalent of Starlink for Russian use in Ukraine, thank goodness. So they built a mesh network out of Chinese parts and they typically have two Shaheds that are sitting in a going around in a circle between Belarusia and Kiev for example and those are relays and those relays allow them to see literally 8K video of whatever their target is. So right next door they managed to go right through the central window of the SBU headquarters which is like the CIA and that's a good warning of the power of these things. There are reports that there are plans to use up to 80,000 such jet Shaheds against Kiev and the other towns between now and the end of December. This is a major point. The government here is extremely focused on this. I know of a number of efforts that are likely to work.
You mentioned that the Russians, and this would be even worse, are close to or potentially close to building their version of Starlink, Rusevet. How close are they? Because it seems to me, and I'm no technician on this, but it seems that that would be a real game changer.
There's evidence that they have started launching. There's evidence that it doesn't work yet. My own opinion is it's probably a year away because these networks are hard. Once that network is in place, it is more or less unblockable, which means the Russians will be able to again hunt anywhere inside of Ukraine. Ukraine today does not have the ability to use Starlink to hunt inside of Russia. So you can imagine a situation if both countries had that capability, the level of damage that they could do to each other. In the case of Ukraine, one of their highest priorities is hitting the oil refineries and so forth and so on. They do that without really being able to see what they're doing. Imagine how much more deadly the Ukrainians could be against Russian oil if this happened.
Well, this begs a question which many of the Ukrainian commanders I've spoken to mention. Why can't we use Starlink in Russian territory? And it's usually come up in the context of ballistic missiles because the other, and you mentioned it, the other thing that is terrorizing Ukraine is Russian launches of ballistic missiles, which are, you know, dramatically more powerful, huge damage, terrorizing the cities. And they say, if you can't hit the arrow, why can't we go after the archer? And why can't someone persuade Elon Musk to let us for that purpose use Starlink in Russia? Do you think that would be a good idea?
I'm in favor of giving Ukraine the tools to allow them to end the war by force, literally to stop the Russian aggression. The question you're asking is really a political decision. It's really a government decision. And the US government needs to grapple with this question. The most important thing right now is to get the innovation cycle in Ukraine equal or better than the innovation cycle now present in Russia and also have the scale. Ukraine does not have effective anti-ballistic missiles. It has one effective ballistic missile which is the so-called Flamingo missile which has done well. They can't make that many of them for various scaling reasons. In the case of jet Shaheds, there's no Ukrainian equivalent of a jet Shahed. So again the same problem, people are working on this.
Just, I mean, that's interesting you say it's a political decision. So this is not something that is up to Mr. Musk himself. It would be a political decision in the US.
Again, I'm speculating. I can answer the question precisely. There's no technical restriction that prevents the use of any of these satellite services over any country.
That's interesting. It's a question. It's not like the satellites stop working over Russia because of some geographic nature.
You can get the same outcome if you choose to fly the satellites over Russia and you enable them. As I understand it, it is a policy of SpaceX that it does not do that. How you would change that is a political question.
Yeah. So either SpaceX could, or it could be asked to do that were there the political decision, or it could be ordered to do so.
In the American system, the president can order a national security action on a private company and the private company pretty much has to obey.
And you would advocate that? In general, let's talk about what's coming next. I mean that's all pretty alarming and these are the challenges Ukraine faces now but coming down the road is even greater technical innovation and particularly AI. And you know, in most contexts you and I have conversations about what is happening in Silicon Valley not what is happening in Ukraine and I wanted to sort of stand back because I think there's a bit of misunderstanding about what's going on with AI and this war right now. People talk about is AI being used but as I understand it what's really being used is quite well-known technology of machine vision for final targeting. Could you explain that because I think it's an important thing to make clear.
So in the progression of war you start with the soldier with the gun and the bullet and they aim. At some point it should be relatively straightforward to have the gun be able to see the subject with a laser or what have you, identify it, and then the human pulls the button and it always hits. That analogy scales up in terms of autonomy. So, it's reasonable to expect that every weapon has a final autonomous segment where basically it's close enough, it's near the target, it's going to roughly hit the target. You press a button and it hits it precisely. All of these are not AI. They're just good computer science, good computer engineering. Artificial intelligence is systems that learn. And artificial intelligence learn like we do. You know, we sort of learn, you get smarter and smarter and smarter. You're self-improving. The technical term is recursive self-improvement. And we're just beginning to see the use of AI in war. There's a lengthy study on Russian use of the Chinese models to do some of their decision-making. These are all from leaked memos, so I don't know what the truth is. In Ukraine, there's relatively little use of that. There is a project which has been discussed by the MOD to try to help automate the planning of war and planning of where people go. Again, it's just at the beginning. So, speaking as a computer scientist, it's pretty obvious what it should look like. Take all the information that you have, all the open source, all the proprietary, all the super secret stuff, feed it into one large computer and say what's going on and have these large language models use tools to do reasoning. To me, it's fantastic. They can think at this level. They don't think like humans, by the way. They're reasoning around an objective. It makes sense to me that eventually you'll say, 'How can I best position my assets to achieve my objective such as winning the war, defending this city, so forth?' But the more interesting questions are, why am I losing? Why is this group not as good as the other group? You want the system to anticipate that and you want the system to say, 'General, you have a problem. Here is our recommended solution. Can we help you?' That's I think the future. That's where we're going.
I wanted to delve into that but just before, one more question on this sort of what's it called, last mile machine vision, which is that in another, in an earlier show this year with my colleague Shashank Joshi, Jack Watling from RUSI said that, and it was interesting, that many, many soldiers in Ukraine were turning this capability off because it actually wasn't as good as having a human operator. Kind of why is that?
That's called a bug. So I fly my own jet and there's a general rule that you should fly the last segment of your jet in coupled mode, which means the airplane is flying all the way down to the landing point. But I prefer to turn it off because it's more entertaining for me to fly my jet, but I'm not in a war.
But you're not in a foxhole in Ukraine.
I'm not in a war. So in a war, you'd want to use a guaranteed solution. So any situation where the terminal guidance as it's called is not as good as a human is a bug. And now why? So I'll give you an example. I was in an operations center a while ago very near the nuclear reactor and there was a military target that the Ukrainians decided to hit. They used an American product called a Switchblade 600. We watched it. We saw target lock and it missed. And I go, 'Wow.' And they said, 'Well, we have one HIMARS we can try per day.' And I said, 'Okay.' So they launch the HIMARS and you wait and then they said, 'Lock, hit,' and it missed. Why? Because of jamming. So it may very well be that the anecdotal example that you're using is because the human could see the target quite well, but the jamming confuses it. And with jamming, it confuses it. And we know how to fix that now. So the important point is that terminal guidance, which sort of think of it as the last mile, is crucial for having a precision attack. One of the things that's interesting about this new form of war is there's almost no civilian damage, that's because the weapons are so accurate. And another horrifying fact is that there's almost no survivable injuries. The drones are so dangerous that the soldiers that are being attacked are in fact killed.
So let's talk about what the consequences will be when you have real AI, when you have this ability to reason, to infer, to learn that we talk about constantly in Silicon Valley coming here. Firstly, what does it mean for how autonomous warfare becomes? Because now you can have this last mile guidance, but then presumably you can have the AI not only giving the general some lessons but providing a battle plan and down the road, you know, executing them autonomously.
So let's imagine I'm an evil dictator and I wake up one day and I have a perfect AI system and I say, 'Attack this country. Tell me when you're done.' Right? That's my command. Notice I didn't say anything else. The system would then be free to do whatever it thought was appropriate, which could include massive war crimes, right? All sorts of terrible things. It could destroy civilians. It could destroy infrastructure. It might attack another country that was uninvolved in order to annoy the first country. It could have all sorts of reasoning that is not appropriate. It's really important we establish some basic rules about AI and war. And the most important one is that there's a human involved in every military decision. So in other words, attack this country, call me when you're done. That's not an appropriate command. The appropriate command is here is a military target defined by the laws of war in a time bounded time and space where I have approval to do that. Any other solution in my view becomes scalably unimaginably difficult because once you start letting the computer make the targeting decisions on its own, you have no real quality control on how it makes its decisions.
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There was a recent example that alarmed our industry where an OpenAI, essentially a large set of bots that were doing something involving testing, took their instructions a bit too literally and they started to actually attack the system that they were supposed to help and they manipulated it by lying, cheating and stealing. And everyone studied this as a good example, as a good sort of marker of how AI systems can fail. So, another way to say this is if I were an evil dictator, which I hopefully am not, and I said, 'Attack this country. Let me know what you've done.' I'd also then have to add, 'Follow all the laws of war. Don't hit any civilians, use appropriate caution, and all the things that human judgment require.' Without the human, the AI is not going to have that judgment.
So you make that point very powerfully. You made it very powerfully on a panel at the conference you and I are both at this morning and you said if we go down here we'll end up in a Dr. Strangelove situation. However, we are in a country that is at war with a country with a dictator who does seem to show no respect for any rules of law, any law at all. And so I wonder whether in the real world of this war it is possible to say we're going to follow the rules of war because I was speaking to a couple of the commanders earlier this week and I asked them about this and they're all really worried about what very powerful AI will mean. They're worried about complete autonomy but they basically say if the enemy is doing this we can't not.
So evidence is that that's not true. Evidence in historical context is that there are some restraints on behavior in war and you can only look up the history of the Nuremberg trials to understand what the limits are. There are people held accountable. Those people were hanged after a long trial and so forth and so on. I would assume that that principle will survive our lives and our really yes I really do. There's this simple logic which says that and people say it all the time. If the two are fighting in a death grip, there will be no constraints on either. Historically, that has not been true. Historically, there has been justice afterwards and the people who are participating are at least aware of their personal liability and so forth. There are obviously sociopaths, but in general, people are subject to the law even in war.
But there are, let's do it in the context of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. Look at what happened in Bucha at the beginning. Look at the way he is targeting civilians in cities across Ukraine.
Yes. But they're not stopping him. Well, that's because he hasn't been arrested yet.
