The Kissinger Connection

In addition to being his co-author, Henry Kissinger, 98, considers Eric Schmidt (in his words) “one of my best friends.” As Schmidt told The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, “I am convinced that the secret to longevity is being a workaholic. The reason I say that is that Henry Kissinger, at the age of 90, knew nothing about the digital world, although he had a lot of opinions about it. But he has mastered the digital world and artificial intelligence with the alacrity and the speed of people who are just getting into it now.” It was Schmidt who first sparked his interest in the subject during his tenure at Google when he invited Kissinger to give a speech at the tech giant’s HQ. At a 2019 National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Conference, Kissinger reportedly cited that as the beginning of their friendship. According to Time, Schmidt subsequently persuaded Kissinger to attend a lecture on Artificial Intelligence while at the Bilderberg conference in 2016.

“The technological miracle doesn’t fascinate me so much; what fascinates me is that we are moving into a new period of human consciousness which we don’t yet fully understand,” as Kissinger told Time. “I think the technology companies have led the way into a new period of human consciousness, like the Enlightenment generations did when they moved from religion to reason, and the technologists are showing us how to relate reason to artificial intelligence. It’s a different kind of knowledge in some respects, because with reason—the world in which I grew up—each evidence supports the other.” However, the statesman points out, “With artificial intelligence, the astounding thing is, you come up with a conclusion which is correct. But you don’t know why. That’s a totally new challenge. And so in some ways, what they have invented is dangerous. But it advances our culture. Would we be better off if it had never been invented? I don’t know that. But now that it exists, we have to understand it. And it cannot be eliminated. Too much of our life is already consumed by it.”