What do you get when you combine the loneliness epidemic with the advent of AI? According to Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google (GOOGL) and an avid investor in the AI space, the answer is the rise of real friends—or even girlfriends—among teenagers. Such overreliance on digital connectivity is “a good example of an unexpected problem with existing technology,” Schmidt said earlier this week during an interview with Prof G Show The podcast is hosted by Scott Galloway.
Schmidt is optimistic about AI applications in all areas such as drug discovery, climate change solutions and enhanced education. “All these things are coming, and these are great,” he said. But he warned about the use of technology in situations such as biological harm, cyber attacks and its potential to shape the actions of impressionable youth.
Schmidt is particularly concerned about the impact of AI on men, who are no longer entering higher education at the same rates as young women and who have therefore seen the “paths to success” made more difficult. “They turn to the online world for fun and survival, but also thanks to social media algorithms they find like-minded people who end up changing them,” Schmidt said. Nearly half of young men describe their online lives as more engaging and rewarding than their offline lives, according to a 2023 study from nonprofit Equimundo.
Young people can form attachments to AI as friends or romantic partners—for example, in the form of a digital girlfriend who “seems to be perfect, emotionally perfect,” Schmidt said. This type of communication can turn into an obsession with at-risk youth who are “not fully formed,” Schmidt said. It would be up to AI developers to ensure that this technology is safe and does not pose a risk to young people who are “highly suggestive” or up to regulators to limit such applications with monitoring tools, he said.
How can the impact of AI on youth be controlled?
The US has a lot of laws around the “age of maturity” for teenagers, “yet you put a 12- or 13-year-old in front of these things and they have access to all the evil—and all the good in the world—and they're not ready to take it,” Schmidt said, adding that he is particularly concerned about the effect of AI on the “human mind.”
Legislation is needed to determine what ages qualify for unlimited AI access, according to Schmidt, who noted that laws like Section 230, which protects social networks from lawsuits related to content posted by third-party users, should be amended to allow for “liability in the most serious cases.”
Incidents linked to AI relationships between young people have already occurred. In February, a 14-year-old boy killed himself shortly after chatting with an AI friend from the chatbot service Character.AI. “I think we can all agree that youth suicide is wrong, so controlling the industry so that it doesn't produce that message strikes me as absurd,” Schmidt said.
The timeline for when the toughened rule will go into effect, however, is up in the air. Given President-elect Donald Trump's plans to rescind the Biden executive order on AI in order to protect strong AI, the decline in AI regulations over the next few years is “a fair prediction,” the former Google CEO said.
Schmidt has a large financial stake in emerging technologies. His venture capital firm, Innovation Endeavors, has poured millions into high-flying AI startups, including Stability AI, Inflection AI and Mistral AI.
