Eric Schmidt Says He Often Meets People Who Can't Tell Apart The Real World From The Online One, Now The Ex-Google Boss Is Warning AI Will Only Make It Worse

Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told a Faena Forum audience that artificial intelligence will "exacerbate" people's tendency to confuse life online with life offline, a problem he said the late Henry Kissinger had anticipated years ago.

What Happened: Sitting beside journalist Sean McManus at the Faena Forum, Schmidt recalled Kissinger's lifelong interest in how humans construct reality and warned that generative AI is "going to be exacerbated … to a level that's hard for all of us to understand."

"I meet all sorts of people who seem to be confused between the difference between the online world and the real world," he said, predicting the gulf will widen as large models tailor hyper-personalised content.

Schmidt traced the conversation back to a 2010s Bilderberg meeting where he first engaged Kissinger on algorithmic power— an exchange the strategist later called a "new definition of reality." Kissinger, then 95, pressed Schmidt to co-author The Age of AI and its sequel Genesis, finishing edits a week before his death.

Schmidt has long warned policymakers of the “existential risk” AI may pose to the masses and has also expressed concerns over the U.S. government's potential pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Why It Matters: OpenAI boss Sam Altman has likewise cautioned that the scale of the coming AI wave is "beyond what we can wrap our heads around," urging "humility and caution." Alphabet Inc. GOOGL GOOG Sundar Pichai has also emphasized the need for an open mind and acknowledged the weight of technology like AI, which can progress rapidly and potentially cause large-scale societal disruptions.

Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk have gone further, warning that deepfakes are nudging society toward a "simulated future" where citizens struggle to prove anything is real.

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