埃里克·施密特专攻人工智能。在BBC的一篇评论文章中，高度固执己见的谷歌（Google）主席（不久将成为Alphabet）写道，我们比以往任何时候都更接近真正的人工智能，对其发展的持续研究将产生积极的副作用，将使公众受益。

施密特在文章中指出，人工智能相关的研究在几年前迎来了一个转折点，此前人工神经网络领域的领军人物杰夫·辛顿（Geoff Hinton）领导的一个团队能够大幅提高语音识别能力，并帮助谷歌的努力提高了25%，这一飞跃将需要多年的研究。施密特还指出，消费者对能够积极解决现实问题的技术的兴趣让位给了对人工智能的更多研究：

And it's been accelerated by tackling real-world problems: how do you build a system that recognizes speech in 58 languages? How do you find someone's first photo of their golden retriever when it's never been labelled? (These aren't just rhetorical questi***; the Google app and Google Photos do this, and many other companies are working on similar real-world applicati*** of machine learning).

In other words, the same c***umer needs that gave rise to the web and the cloud computing that powers it - people wanting to get any question in the world answered or communicate effortlessly across languages - were what refreshed and refocused the basic research in AI.

施密特在讨论人工智能研究对现代音乐服务的影响时，还暗中向苹果音乐开了一枪。施密特说，公司应该使用算法来确定用户接下来想要听什么，而不是**一批品酒师来策划音乐——这正是苹果音乐所做的——称这种方法为“精英主义”：

To give just one example: a decade ago, to launch a digital music service, you probably would have enlisted a handful of elite tastemakers to pick the hottest new music.

Today, you're much better off building a **art system that can learn from the real world - what actual listeners are most likely to like next - and help you predict who and where the next Adele might be.

As a bonus, it's a much less elitist taste-making process - much more democratic - allowing everyone to discover the next big star through our own collective tastes and not through the individual preferences of a select few.

对这位前苹果董事（同时也是一家算法驱动型公司的董事长）来说，向苹果开炮并不是什么新鲜事，而且这可能不会是最后一次了。但尽管有许多缺点，施密特还是选择攻击苹果音乐为数不多的几件事之一——策划。虽然音乐服务中的算法和人为策展都有有效的论据，但随着Spotify（算法）和苹果音乐上的早期数字的成功，似乎这两种途径仍然是音乐服务的有效选择。