Eric Schmidt on How Google Works

well good afternoon hello such a pleasure to be here I'm Erin Jana Dean of the school of international public affairs and it is a great honor to welcome you here today thank you for very much for joining us and I apologized for being a few minutes late but if we can extend over a little bit and make sure we get a proper time but I do apologize thank you so I fully understand New York congestion hoping you will solve that for us yes the correct answer the correct answer is autonomous vehicles and self flying airplanes which will happen in your lifetime but we can discuss that so you know we're normally fortunate to have Eric Schmidt who is executive chairman of Google with us today and of course few companies have had the kind of impact in the tech sector and indeed in the world that Google has had as we think about the search for information the ability to communicate online by smartphone and one day to get from place to place you know Google has really changed how we live and work and profound transformations in our economy in the global economy let me just say I think you all know Eric's remarkable background since joining Google in 2001 he has helped grow the company from really a Silicon Valley startup to a global leader as executive chairman he's responsible for the external matters of Google building partnerships business relationships outreach technology thought leadership dealing with governments and a broad range of business and policy issues and of course from 2001 to 11 you were the chief executive officer overseeing technical and business strategy alongside Google's founders and prior to joining he was chairman and CEO of Novell and chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems you chair foundations and various important groups like the New America Foundation we know well and Princeton the Institute for Advanced Study a board member of the Khan Academy and a two-time author with the new digital age co-authored with Jared Cohen and we're here today to discuss a remarkable new book how Google works which just came out in September so we're catching you at the beginning of engaging I think the public around this book which the journal has already declared is a must read for anyone managing technology focused teams and of course this there is a lot of that here at Columbia it's it's really a fascinating book about Google's culture and management and operating in the world so I thought I would ask you a few questions to get us started and then open it up for you to ask what what's on your mind and let me start since a lot of the book is about talent and creativity and managing innovation and we have a room full of what you might call smart creatives who want to change the world I'd like to just invite you to tell our our audience which is very interdisciplinary students who care about policy and business and technology and energy and development finance many subjects what is the key message that you want to convey about identifying and talent and fostering creativity in this generation so so thank you very much thank you guys for being here it's pretty clear that we need more of the kind of talent that makes change happen and when you're in school it's sort of conformist in the sense that they're the rules and the if to you know take your classes and you have to write your PhD or whatever and I think what I've learned in the real world is that you have to protect the Divas and if you're a diva right I won't ask you to raise your hands you know who you are you're passionate you care a lot about things you're a little ornery when people get in your way and you push and you push and you push now with those sorts of things right right how do you feel about those kinds of people well we think that those people should be identified put in charge and listen to because that's how change happens now we have public policy people and students here in the audience what's the number-one problem in America aside from our political system economic growth how do you create economic growth through entrepreneurs the number one and only source of drivers of new jobs are small fast-growing companies called so-called gazelles the big companies on a net basis don't create jobs and the little companies that don't grow don't create jobs the jobs that are created our small fast-growing companies typically venture funded that's the important point so so when we talk about the great business icons and this has been true for decades I think you know the Steve Jobs Bill Gates Larry Page Mark Zuckerberg I were talking with Travis from uber as another example these are people who have created hundreds of thousands millions of jobs so even if you just care about the economic output you want a pretty we want to identify and protect these people I was just reading an article an essay that I wrote in 1959 yes about the creative process yes I actually read that uh-huh yes interesting so he was arguing there that really the best ideas come out of working alone or he was positing that it was important individuals work alone because when you work in group groups that it you know good ideas and bad ideas commingle and in groups you know there's a hit there's an adverse consequence of airing the good and the bad and that hurts creativity how do you think about that so we would take his idea from 1959 and and modified in the following way we would say that the most important thing to do is to have the best idea and often the best idea does not occur in a linear process it does not occur it does not occur in the normal meetings right it occurs on Saturday mornings when you have unstructured science of creativity these ideas come when you least expect them right when you wake up in the long night and you have this brilliant idea you write it down because you know when you wake up in the morning you'll have forgotten it already and and that's just the nature of the way the human mind works so that's sort of observation number one he's referring to that the second thing is that when you manage teams you want to make sure that you don't manage a community to to to a standard you want to manage to the best idea not the average idea so how do you do that all right well you end up having to have a discussion and by a discussion I mean a robust discussion I mean an argument right so you have to actually sit there in the meeting and you have to say what do you think and what do you think now those of you who've been in business what you'll discover is that in a meeting manager is basically spend all day meetings and they have you know ten people around them and three or four people do all the talking typically male I might add and so as an executive what you want to do is you want to recognize that the people who are not saying anything may have better ideas and call on them and often the woman who never says anything actually has the most thoughtful most innovative and and most clever idea and then everyone also sort of says oh yeah that's great and then they take it as their they're on their own your job is a manage your job as a manager is to get those another aspect of this is that you have to sort of ask for better outcome so here's an example all the discussion about automobiles is around improvements in the cafe efficiency of you know five or 10% now these are material changes but what I would like you all to do is build me a car that has ten times better fuel efficiency so you sit there and you go you know how do I do that and so we sit there and we have this argument and we talk about new materials and new propulsion systems and so forth and we eventually take the best idea and we go at it and we get to three times now in the government that's considered failure because you you set a goal and you didn't meet it but from a business perspective if you aim really really high then even if you get halfway you've done something extraordinary and that's I think what what we have to do I think you have a very fascinating chapter about decisions one of those important decisions was about China which you would you consider in this in this book and I think you may have argued that the positive effect of Google's presence in China would outweigh the negative effects of cooperating at a certain moment of time but ultimately you pulled out and I guess looking back at this experience how would you frame the trade-offs and the decisions what's interesting is that we we put this in the book not because of the we wanted to to tell people something new about the decision the decision has been well covered that four years ago we just we said sort of one country two systems' we like Hong Kong we're moving to Hong Kong okay I sort of got that but it was more the process that we went through so in my case would happen on the CEO after work Larry and Sergey and I know all the other executives well and I I knew where Sergey was and I was pretty sure I knew where Larry was and I was pretty sure I knew where most of their executives were so at that point what do you do you don't just decide right you have to have a formal process so in our case what happened was at four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon we actually spent a three-hour meeting the first hour and a half went through all of the details of the attacks by the Chinese government on Google in great detail in it and at the time they had attacked at least 20 other companies and we studied that and we're quite sure we had the facts right so there the question was what to do and everyone sort of debated and debated and it was pretty clear that people's minds were pretty well made up right but the the viewpoints had solidified by all the data and so my position was okay we have to have a vote and we voted the majority voted to pull out and we did well why go through that three hours if you already knew what the decision was going to be well because at the moment we made the decision everyone including the people who didn't agree had to go and implement in two days what was a very consequential decision the board had to be consulted notified and so forth the partners had to be consulted and notified the engineers had to change links in a complicated way things had to be moved and it all had to get done by Tuesday morning when it was announced so we tell the story not so much to point at China and whether we like to or not China today is fully blocked so Google is fully blocked in China so that I would say that's a bad outcome from where we are today and people are using Baidu and other services and so forth but the important point is the company made the decision you know a lot of different parts of the book engaged the question of data and how it's changing over our world and of course there's a great university you know we are training our students we're investing in in cutting-edge work around data and and I wondered if you could say a little bit more about how you see the global landscape evolving around data localization and what its consequences are if we end up with the world of data localization what does that mean for innovation so we have a great fear that the internet is going to get broken and so the term data localization in this context refers to a requirement by governments or countries that the data be in their country and subject to their laws the core issue with China was that the Chinese laws with respect to privacy and rights and so forth and censorship caused them to want us to put their shirt you know our servers in the country and to censor them and so forth and we didn't like that but many other countries would like that would like that I'll give you an example Germany announced that as a result of the NSA stuff they would actually like to have Google servers in their country under the presumption that the NSA could not spy on Google servers in their own country this is what they told us so while I understand the objective and I certainly am sympathetic with the fact that people don't want to be spied on by the NSA because Google didn't like to be spied on the NSA the fact of the matter is that we've sold it in a different way and this has led to a whole new controversy so these issues right whether their privacy and data localization and the role of the state have always been present in society and in technology and there's always been concerns however there is something new in 1975 a version of something called public key encryption was invented mathematically today it is the basis of privacy and because the Internet has so many possible ways in which people can be in the middle of you of your transaction these are called a man-in-the-middle of attacks what's happened is the entire industry led by Google and now by Apple as well have gone to end-to-end encryption including encryption at rest so this specifically means the following first it means that if you have information that you would like to be kept private the best place for you to keep it is in Gmail right and I say that without reservation because we will make sure we will do everything humanly possible to make sure that that information is fully encrypted in Gmail and your Google Docs and so forth are now fully encrypted at rest so that means if someone you know with a gun goes and takes the server and takes the hard drive and starts playing with it they just get gibberish and the math is such that the kind of encryption we're doing is not breakable in the lifetimes of of us as best we can tell and our scientists are just as good as everybody else's so I'm quite sure of this and then recently Apple announced that this month they're going to encrypt to the iPhone all the way end-to-end and Google has had that facility for a while we turned it on to default with our latest release roughly the same time this has led to a firestorm of criticism from legitimate organizations like the FBI who've said you're making our jobs harder and my attitude is look you guys you guys but you guys the government did this what did you expect right so now there are people who are running around saying that what we would like to do is have trapdoors so that the federal government who are legitimate and law-abiding I'm sure would be able to snoop and otherwise watch your information how do you know and how does Google know that an evil government someone other than the United States government and other than the National Security Agency right for example might not also be in there so I think I think the industry has and this is completely legal so I think that they well this is one of the consequences of the NSA and the Snowden affair it's quite profound and very important to understand it's sociological policies and Google makes no and I make no apologies for this our job is to protect our users from unauthorized and illegal snooping and backdoor attacks and we've done something thank you I think one issue that if you don't mind me straight from the book but it's very important and that you are very much at the cutting edge of is of course this European case involving the right to be forgotten and just wonder if you could share a little perspective around that you you know given the nature of how information resides on the Internet is it feasible and n is it fair to impose that kind of burden and are there better mechanisms again an excellent question let's do a survey raise your hand if there's any information on the internet that's embarrassing about you at all come on come on there's a lot for you okay good okay raise your hand if there were a simple process to remove it would you choose to remove it yeah okay so what does that tell us you've got a big job so let me let me give you this we've been running the right to be forgotten hearings within group within Europe and I've been the chairman of them and we've been listening to Europeans on the subject and an American would look at the laws that they've passed and say that's censorship but that's not how a European views it and they have very strong privacy rights and the European Court of Justice found in May that roughly the following if you're not a public figure which the majority of you are not public figures and if the information is not of general interest to the public a term which is ill-defined and you're a European resident and citizen which the majority of you are not you may apply to Google who will in its own judgement right determine those criteria and remove it from Google this information by the way will remain because of a way in which they classified Google versus newspapers in the newspaper this specific case was a gentleman who had a tax problem involving paying taxes for his house in Spain what a surprise and twenty years ago and this tax judgment which was an implication of illegality was around and he was written up in the newspaper and he won a case which was a specific order to have the information removed from Google so it's true that it's out of Google but it's not true that it's out of the world and so my opinion having now done the meetings talk to everybody is that this was a very clever decision by the pens because the politicians don't need to be in the middle of the right to be forgotten versus the right to know and the decision put Google as the decision-maker we've had about a hundred and fifty five thousand requests that number is increasing as people learn about it and so forth and we have to follow the law all of us in the industry believe that that any that tinkering with the Internet is a very very dangerous road to go down because you could imagine this particular right and then you could imagine other rights and there are roughly 44 countries that do forms of censorship of the Internet and as an example there are many authoritarianism that use under the guise of protecting people against adult pornography it turns out their definition of adult or child pornography includes an awful lot of political speech right so they understand what they're doing and they're trying to make sure that that the Internet is not used to do this Russia has now gone through a very very restrictive period and in the last six months it looks like Russia is gonna be very tough on this yeah some very very tough laws in the books and they started focusing on Twitter and perhaps they'll focus on others as well that's one last question just a bit of your book ends with consideration of the government and how policies matter and you talk about regulation and immigration but you know Silicon Valley is the envy of the world the wonder to so many jurisdictions coming out of that culture what are the what's the role of policy in supporting an innovation environment I think we know now roughly why what the right solutions are in order to get this stuff going I think the first one I would I would offer is immigration in the list of stupid things that the u.s. government does at the very top has to be the fact that people come to Columbia they're highly educated and then we kicked them out of the country right then that's got to be the top of the list I mean come on guys right and these are people who would remain in our country they would found companies they would become great citizens they would pay lots of taxes and you know reproduce and off they go right it's the American dream and we're making it impossible we've been fighting that issue for twenty years and there have been various proposals like staple the green card to the PhD okay that didn't pass okay so like we don't want more people with PhDs I mean come on we need education I think so that's point number one I think point number two is that the educational system is lagging what is needed in stem and if you look at the number if you one of the issues with Europe going back to Europe is Europe is underfunding its research universities its graduate schools and so forth relative to America what's the issue with America we're underfunding relative to Asia and furthermore just on a numeric basis they have a larger number and therefore assuming a normal distribution of IQ right they're going to have more smarter people who will be crazy enough to create all these new companies so we have a very serious issue over the next twenty thirty years of the rise of Asia and the rise of Asia technology because of over investment relative to us there that's got to get fixed and then there's all of the issues of K through 12 education and so forth then there's one more and this is an area where Google the US is a good example in Google Google has done well but I'm worried about it and it has to do with over-regulation the best example I can think of here is that in well there are two good examples we'll use uber which everybody will understand in spectrum uber is easy to understand because uber is hoover's the true innovator in any sort of sharing transportation models and Google to as a full matter of full disclosure Google is an investor in uber and we're all friends and so we're sort of guilty by association and uber is now available in the majority of cities in America and is blocked in a number of play in Europe and in every case it's a very straightforward argument it's not a consumer argument it's an incumbent argument and for a modern capitalist system to work you have to not protect the businesses you have to promote competition in favor of consumers let's look at spectrum there's a new idea around spectrum everybody here uses iPhones or androids and everyone spends all the time on mobile computing it's this huge revolution right all the models say they were gonna run out of spectrum between 2016 2017 and this is after having sold you know billions of dollars of extra spectrum I'm turning off those channels in UHF between 60 and 69 that know everybody watched and we repurpose them and so for the song now why is this it's because the spectrum isn't shared and that new technology allows for spectrum sharing this is roughly the same as when you're using your phone you're the only car on the highway whereas in the new technology be shirring so you sit there and you go it's a brilliant idea the white house I was part of a technique of a group that did a report on this the facts are clear the problem is there's no spectrum that allows for the experimentation of the sharing model that would solve this problem so I can give you example after example of that where because the internet was unregulated you've got a situation where you have this incredible competition between Apple and the Android phones from your perspective Apple and Samsung which is draw brought products down at this enormous rate right millions and millions of apps on top of it why can't we get that level of innovation in other industries and a lot of it is either poor regulation or regulation with too much detail which sort of specifies outcomes and so forth one more things this is a public policy on us for a decade the t1 speed was regulated at one point five megabits and there were entire companies formed to do unregulated connectivity at one point four megabits it was a complete artifact of regulation another example what here is the majority of data going today it's what what is Wi-Fi live it lives in an unregulated band the majority of your internet connectivity goes through an unregulated ban the regulated bands which are far more plentiful our farm are far less full and I can go on thank you very much let's open it up for a few questions please no speeches real questions so so the first question was how would I improve Google's products I'll talk a little bit about that oh there's lots of Google products I'll talk about some of the futures there but let's talk about employment first Google is Google has the luxury of being able to hire really really very smart people and I'm always struck by that and we don't hire friends of friends we hire the way universities work where we have hiring committees and so forth and in many cases the engineers that come into the company don't even know what product they're going to work on when they're interviewing and often the executives salespeople and so forth so so we basically say we're looking for the person and in the book we spent a fair amount of time saying the way you should hire people is about the person not about the knowledge that they have and the example that we use here is hire general purpose smart people rather than specific people with a lot of specific domain experience because you never know but a really smart person will figure it out and they'll be able to change with the facts around them that's how we do it so roughly for as a general number roughly half of the people we hire are technical in nature roughly half are non-technical for the non-technical things we're looking for people who have you know great insights they're quick thinkers they write well and they're they're aggressive and what they do they they have a vision they're curious in the book we talk about something called smart creatives where we say you need to know something about something technical to some kind of business affinity and you have to be curious and that's what we've seen the same for in terms of products there so you know the products are never done right but I think the most interesting stuff will be and how search gets better because of artificial intelligence as the computers get smarter and as they'd be able to you know they can answer questions like do I really want to be in New York today and do it what I really rather be in DC do I really want to be at dinner you know in the north side or the uptown or downtown those kinds of questions will be possible to ask in the next few years and our technology is getting better and better and better how what should I do about that or is the fact that I'm asking this here mean that I should focus elsewhere than aren't being an entrepreneur well the first place is that we need more entrepreneurs like you the country needs entrepreneurs for many many reasons is how and again given that nothing changes in the government right the story of America will be built by entrepreneurs like yourself right who have isn't well well but you're clearly an entrepreneur in your sort of ready to be an entrepreneur okay so so let's talk about the money there plenty of places to get money now the world is awash and venture money there's all sorts of secondary ways of doing it most successful entrepreneurs raise a small amount of money from friends and family in order to get to a proof of concept and then they go and raise a first round and they figure that well you may not have a choice and but but but but hear me out so the tip model is you have your idea you raise some money you do a proof-of-concept right and then you go and you raise money entrepreneurs spend an awful lot of time raising money and the other thing we talk a lot about this in the book is the quality of hiring and the venture capitalist will look at your idea but more importantly the quality of the people that you can recruit thank you the head of Columbia so to what extent how would you assess the digital literacy of the people that you come in contact with other than programmers or in specific engineers the doctors and lawyers and business people and to the extent that you think it would be necessary do you think it's appropriate that universities like Columbia or others try to bring up the level of digital literacy and their student body in their alumni base well as a general rule people who are older or non-technical are not very digitally literate and they sort of just do the best they can the best picture is always the six year old teaching his or her grandmother how to use the Mac I mean that's sort of one of the iconic images of America today you know that the clearly the grandchild right teaching the grandparents this is a wonderful metaphor so I am strongly in favor of universities doing roughly the following I think universities should have a data analytics and you know computer from the ureña class which is given to pretty much every fresh freshman and or the majority of them and data analytics here means the ability to understand how computers help make decisions what statistical inference is the general world of big data because this is the world people are coming in and then some kind of familiarity with programming at a minimum web programming and a lot of universities are bidding to talk about that and that I think addresses the core level of digital literacy for people who are non-technical is they have to be able to not be surprised by things they have to have a basic understanding of what computers are doing but more importantly what's being done with their information and how inferences are made in the in if you think about a student today here at Columbia over 20 or 30 years the advances in the ability of analyzed using machine intelligence again against big data are going to be profound so every one of these people will go into a business which is going to be using those to make their businesses more profitable more targeted and so forth we need to understand governments are very slow to to incorporate these things and so I think in general we're probably better off focusing on the private sector and then letting the government contract with the private sector for these sort of services I wanted to ask how you decide in which product you have to be a first mover or you have to be a last mover we never use those terms but I see the trick in Gmail and all the other things like after Google search there is no other search engine like Google where as I see Google Earth you always take advantage nobody else came after you so far these are all that so far those are all number ones yeah so they define which product and how you like if there are already multiple products in the market then how you decide that okay now how we are also the added on entrant in the market and how you decided to be pioneer in the market so we talked about this in the book at some length and the core idea here is that it used to be as an entrepreneur that you had things to worry about like distribution or money or brand and what we say in the book is the only thing that matters now is great products right this is about creativity and engineering and building products and the example I would offer is that there's a huge number of new brands that have emerged because of the internet the Internet allows you to reach everybody without gatekeepers right which didn't used to be the case and people are willing to adopt new things if they solve new problems so you should judge Google's efforts by whether the products are exceptionally good and I would argue the two that you names search in Gmail and I would add chrome and Android and a few others are just better and we're very proud of that so we spent all day trying to do that we don't use the first mover last mover arguments at all and if there's a if there's incumbents in a market we try very hard not to do what they're doing and try to do something different if we don't have an idea of something doing different we're probably better off not doing it and that's part of our secret so there's a large meme in the economics profession and among the sort of elites that think about this that goes something like this there's a great deal of evidence of hollowing out of incomes that the elites knowledge workers people in power so forth and so on have done pretty well and that on the manufacturing jobs which used to be plentiful have gone away or going away and they're being replaced by a large number of lower paying service workers and the there's a very well-known study by a guy named David autor a uto are of MIT which is I think pretty accurate which basically is the basis of this these trends by the way are not new they've been going on for manufacturing jobs have been in decline for many decades and indeed healthcare is a larger supplier now of jobs and manufacturing in America shouldn't surprise you given the amounts of money we spend on healthcare so that all makes sense so then we get to the guessing and the guessing is that that this change is permanent and that the people who are being displaced will not be able to take advantage of the higher income knowledge worker jobs and they'll be forced into these service jobs in the future and that's that's a matter of cheb that's a matter of guessing or or prediction we don't know so we have a rule of Google that we always start meetings with data and if you don't have we'll just use my opinion right so it's sort of a different sort of a different concept of running thing so since we don't actually have any facts I'm right so I'll tell you what I think and you can decide if you if you agree with me I think that the negative cast of the argument which is the way you phrased it is in fact wrong this is my opinion and here's why Google and other companies are working very hard to make everybody smarter that includes the uneducated people that includes the people who do not have the benefit of going to an Ivy League university that includes the people who did not get a graduate degree that includes the people whose English is poor and all of these people who somehow we are shunting into service jobs is an awful lot of evidence that people who work with computers make more money than people who don't so I would argue this is my opinion because I don't think there's any facts here and I look for the facts for the last six months so I met with all the economists so I think I really have been trying to answer this question I believe that there will be lots of interesting new kinds of jobs because of this technological dislocation and that this time it's not different right that these dislocations are normal that it's a society this is why we have an educational system this is why we focus on entrepreneurs and all those things but it's in a while but it's a it's a good debating one of the reason I decided I came to my view is that everyone else was so depressed no no nobody doesn't have any jobs the computer is going to take over everything and there's no precedent for this the reality is that there are these huge dislocations in history it's been going on for hundreds of years and basically society is full of very smart people and we adapt right and some people get left behind and we try to sort of help them with social services or their families or whatever but the fact of the matter is this is capitalism I'm with you you are standing up please my name is lunching I'm from the new town dynasty television when Google moved out of China a lot of the Chinese users warned over the loss and they even give a lot of flowers as we can see and when you mentioned that one country two systems could go to Hong Kong our people in Hong Kong now is covering in a 24/7 manner about the umbrella movement so far we only hear about the people in entertainment business voicing their support I wonder what do you think the business people could do or would do to push and push and make changes in the situation in the world today thank you I'm not enough of an expert about the actual politics of Hong Kong right now but I do know that we have a vibrant and healthy business in Hong Kong and in Taiwan and I do know that our services are largely blocked in China and there's no confusion as to who's doing their blocking right it's delivered by the government because they don't they don't want our services in China I and others are trying to make that decision changed I think that's probably all I should say about about China China is a different system I spent a fair amount of time there I think I met all the leaders and so forth and I think it works for many of the Chinese people which is why I persists universities produced knowledge they have for several hundred years quite successfully they produce it on the assumption that the way they produce the knowledge is important as the knowledge itself and we we are we share that with everyone I share with you my experimental design I share with you my sampling frame I share with you my radiocarbon dating except except you produce knowledge but you don't share with us the process by which you produce it because it's a trade secret their algorithms are tracing over before we appreciate that you have every right to do that but how are we going to work together when we have fun a different idea about what has to be transparent from what the private sector producing knowledge has I'm not I think I understand your question I'm not sure what the issue is because from the Google's perspective our services are free and we are incredibly proud of the universities and students and so forth using all that information as much as they possibly have it the issue is if Google says the flu epidemic has this shape and CBS says it has this shape and CDC tells us how they reduce produced that piece of information and Google does not varied as a society I said and and I don't know what the solution to that is that's what I'm asking you just tell me a lie about that no no I understand I think from the math the vast majority of what Google does in in your in the way you're framing it is not producing knowledge but rather organizing the knowledge of others right so the algorithms that are the ranking algorithms which we keep as proprietary and trade secrets we want to do that but that doesn't mean that we're blocking or preventing any knowledge transfer in the case of flu trends for example we did actually publish the nature of the algorithm but it would have been a violation of our privacy policy to talk about the specifics so we didn't want to cross that line so again I'm not sure that that's such a big deal I think indeed we don't do very much of that in the scheme of things and the vast majority of information is broadly used so I guess I'm not sure I agree that it's such a big issue we want to work very very closely with faculty members researchers and graduate students we've worked hard to publish api's that will give people access to internal systems consistent with not screwing up people's privacy it's it's it's best for me to simply say that we're extremely interested in 3d virtual reality and leave it at that so we have a problem in my industry which is the percentage of women participating is declining and this has occurred at the same time that women have made phenomenal contributions in biology the majority of biological biology PhDs are female the majority of doctors are now female there are 58 percent of the students in college are female right so there's some kind of a problem in our industry there have been many theories as to what the problem is but I think we should start by saying we have a problem some of them involve teenage boys versus teenage girls some of them involve theories that there are unconscious bias biases or certain stylistic aspects and then the traditional issues around child care and others which are all very important so I would say to you that the way to solve this problem is to solve the problem from the standpoint of the woman in other words try to figure out why women are either not getting into these jobs or they're not staying in the jobs because it's a ladder and they fall off the ladder for reasons that are that are personal and complicated and try to figure out to solve each and every one so in Google's case we have a very extensive childcare program which we're very proud of but that doesn't seem to be sufficient it seems to be necessary but we need to come up with some more ideas I don't have more to say there a lot of people have worked on this right and it seems a very hard problem well Jared cohon and I wrote a book on this subject the first book and we talked a lot about the use of technology and reconstruction there's a great deal of evidence that the best thing you can do is have the equivalent of a digital Marine Corps and the equivalent of the digital Marine Corps lands on the beaches and makes the wireless network work right that that post-conflict societies have enormous human problems and again the simplest example think of the current Ebola tragedy imagine if those countries which are among the poorest on the earth had had very high connectivity of smartphones we would have been able to set to save thousands of deaths with respect to knowledge monitoring tracking all the kinds of things that you can do with smartphones but because these are disconnected societies among the generally poor people you have all these sort of horrific things that are happening so Google has done a whole bunch of stuff with respect to Haiti for example rewiring Haiti after the you know terrible accidents there and I think but but the right thing to do is to think of it as in these dire situations connectivity is a huge benefit it allows the NGOs to get themselves organized there were reports in Haiti that until we showed up that the engine nose didn't quite know where to go because the maps didn't work and that people were being you know these people were being seen five times and these other people were seeing zero times so you can sort of implement these sort of systemic rescues if you will or whatever you want to call them in a very methodical way on top of technology called Shahidi which is phenomenal which is a nonprofit that's based in Kenya ask you we haven't had a question about cyber risk and I wonder if you could just offer some thoughts on managing cyber risk is there do you see a world evolving where we can do that or is there just an inevitable dark future arriving around cyber risk cyber war what's interesting is that we seem to be have evolved to a situation where you can have low-grade cyber conflict while having most favored nations between cut between countries so there's a great deal of evidence in the public domain that China America Israel Russia Iran North Korea and so forth all engage in various forms of all of us and so the question I would pose which is a variant of your question is when does the cyber stuff become real war right and my own opinion is that there's some kind of line that we're now establishing that it's okay for intellectual property theft between countries which obviously we oppose at Google and I oppose but somehow we tolerate that but we would never tolerate the murder of a citizen by the same people so there is some kind of line and the military talks about it in terms of cyber versus kinetic and their term for conflict is the word kinetic so there's some kind of barrier that has emerged America has worked very very hard to make our systems much stronger the banking system the power system and so forth and I think we're actually in pretty good shape you never know and I will tell you that if you want to make your secure self immune from all of this you should use Chrome okay now why should you use Chrome by the way it's free okay price is good it's also faster than anyone else always good but the real reason is because chrome has the most sophisticated checks for the kinds of attacks that are being used today so start with using Chrome and then another thing that you can do is something called two-factor authentication Google has offered this for awhile Apple just introduced this and two-factor authentication means that you not only do you have a password but occasionally they have to text your phone a secondary number we since everyone here lives on their phones is not such an inconvenience and that will very much guarantee that you're going to be safe thank you one last question in the back there please you know the kind organizations can actually impact democracies and other governments layer so these two friends like what is your view and what does Google go do well it's it's a good question and I think that the simple answer is that the internet is an enormous positive force for keeping government's companies and citizens honest right it's just enormous li+ a lot of bad stuff occurs in secret because people don't want to write it down they don't want to be held accountable and again in in our first book the new digital age Jared and I talked a lot about what would happen you can imagine scenarios where you have some terrible tribal war you could begin the war crime trial before the conflict is over because there's so much evidence of bad things there are plenty of examples of this but one of the sort of core ideas here look at death rates of conflict death rates have declined quite dramatically so we had a revolution in Ukraine a revolution in Egypt and so forth the number of people who ultimately lost their lives in these very complicated and very very courageous sort of interactions was really quite small and I believe that the television generation plus the internet generation plus the people plus the fact that people had phones has materially improved that and if you want to think of it the easiest examples to think about a woman in a country where women are do not have a lot of rights and where the local authorities are tough and non-responsive with that smartphone she can achieve both safety but more importantly document whatever abuses she sees around on her honor person or among her community it the transparency does in fact police the extremes right the crazy men that want to stone people that kind of thing the crazy people who want to sort of kill people the the Nazi kind of mentality all of that is far far harder to do I would argue that the Internet is this extraordinary force at a political level and I'm very happy to be part of that it presents issues like the ones we're talking about but imagine a world where you didn't have it and you didn't know these things were happening you don't think they were happening now but before of course they were they're happening less now even because you're more aware of them and that is what is so extraordinarily good about the Internet thank you thank you all for this I love the director

Channel: Columbia SIPA

Views: 15,385

Rating: 4.6129031 out of 5

Keywords: Eric Schmidt (Organization Leader), Google (Award Winner), Electrical Engineering (Industry), The Internet (Media Genre), Columbia University (College/University), School Of International And Public Affairs Columbia University (Educational Institution)

Id: NlG8DyPeyZc

Length: 53min 41sec (3221 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 06 2014