"The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will," Schmidt said. "The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence."
The problem with Schmidt's perspective, and to some degree that of the linked article itself, is that they take an "AI" future for granted. Like it's a given that we need to adapt to whatever the tech giants put before us.
But the thing is, the only place where (the success of) "AI" is necessary — that's in those companies' projected earnings. They sunk billions into a technology that could be a big deal in certain number crunching research fields, but to recoup the investment they marketed the product as an everything assistant for everybody.
The corporations pushing "AI" into personal computers, into workspaces, into public governance; they're huge, but they're hardly infallible. They may wish, as in "bet their savings", that this utopian tech dream will work out better than the metaverse ...but that's all it is.
They're just trying to talk their ROI into existence. We need to counter that talk, and that future. It's ours to decide over.