Big Technology Podcast · Wednesday, July 15, 2026
Jürgen Schmidhuber, a prominent figure in AI research, expresses optimism about AI development, aiming to create an AI smarter than himself. He notes that current effective AI is limited to digital interfaces, like chatbots passing the Turing test, but highlights the ongoing progress in physical world AI. Schmidhuber anticipates a future where robots can operate existing machinery, leading to self-replicating and self-improving systems that could usher in a new era of civilization.
“So, since the 1970s, I have been an optimist and I have been claiming that within my lifetime, I want to build an AI that learns to become smarter than myself such that I can retire.”
“However, it just means that the Turing test is a bad way of measuring intelligence because there is no AI in the physical world outside of the screen that can do all the things that a little boy can do, that can do the things that a plumber can do.”
“And I think the culmination point, the culmination point of that, which I've been talking about again for decades, is at some point in the not so distant future, we will have a robot that doesn't have to be super smart, but just smart enough to learn to operate all the already existing machines.”