2000: "Don't be evil" 2025: Eric Schmidt: I'm “a licensed arms dealer.” > He has framed his movement into the A.I. arms sector as implicitly humanitarian. “

2000: "Don't be evil" 2025: Eric Schmidt: I'm “a licensed arms dealer.” > He has framed his movement into the A.I. arms sector as implicitly humanitarian. “Now you sit there and you go, Why would a good liberal like me do that?” he said at Stanford. “The answer is that the whole theory of armies is tanks, artilleries and mortars, and we can eliminate all of them and we can make the penalty for invading a country, at least by land, essentially be impossible.” A.I.-powered weapons, he suggested, could end this kind of warfare. O RLY? >This is a prediction with precedent from when machines guns were poised to upend ground combat as people knew it. In 1877, Richard Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun, a prominent forerunner of automatic fire, proposed that as an efficient multiplier of lethal violence his weapon might spare people the horrors of war. “It occurred to me,” he wrote, that “if I could invent a machine — a gun — which could by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies.” >Maybe the future will prove Eric Schmidt’s vision right. Whatever is coming will reveal itself in time. History shows Gatling was spectacularly wrong.