Eric Schmidt on the New Digital Age

thank you I noticed this afternoon that your profile picture on Twitter has a bulletproof vest on is that what it is it was that for your trip to Britain was my trip to Iraq okay maybe we'll come back on holiday after this yeah sorry about all this you've written a book which is a prophecy book it's about the future this is high risk it seems to be because the future tends to take us by surprise you know Woody Allen's lying about you want to make God laugh tell him your plans for the future so you're sticking your neck out so why do it we got first place let me start by thanking you and thanking intelligence squared of thinking the world Geographic Society for putting this on and thank you all for coming we my co-author Jared and I spent a lot of time talking about the sort of this arguments between techno optimism and techno pessimism and so forth and we eventually got sort of frustrated by the framing that everybody's doing so we set out to sort of explore what what the future would look like at least of the ways that we can predict it now and we ultimately came out with a relatively optimistic view with a whole bunch of very very serious problems which is what the book is about and it's optimistic for the developed world you know here in the UK it's also optimistic for the for the developing world world for all sorts of obvious reasons yeah I mean one of the striking things about the book is that sort of you get over the gadgets of the future in the first couple of chapters well introduction first chapter and then it gets into the deep problems I mean you say you're optimistic but I think people will notice reading this book it's not you're not particularly puffing the company and you're saying you're not saying the futures golden is Google the company the company always likes to you know nice positive Sheen to it obvious reasons as companies do but their think a critical analysis says that these tools and technology are enormous ly valuable they're enormous ly important and whether you like it or not the Internet is going to happen worldwide and all these people going to join us and people are going to react to it government's going to react to it companies in react to its citizens going to react to it citizens interact to each other we tried to sort of lay out what those different scenarios are and and indeed there's a set of issues for which at least I do not have solutions yet in which case we sort of give general statements that we hope maybe technology can come along or new social etiquette can come along when we cover those whether it's in cyber war and privacy in the way government's behave in robotics and those sorts of things Stud that point about governments I mean one of the things you say right to the beginning is the Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in human history now what do you mean by Anarchy innocent well most people are most people have a sort of relatively static model of how people behave and they assume that the government's are sad that the culture is set and so forth but that's not in fact true and we've never had in our history a transformation with so much power to individuals we certainly had transitions of power to monopolies to kings to corporations to dictators even to central governments in in democracies we've never had a situation where everybody had the equivalent of a supercomputer on there in their hands so this is obviously wonderful if you're a woman in a developing world where your rights are terrible and you're mid terribly mistreated and you use this to document the abuses that are occurring for women around you and you cause shame and outers you get that fixed but it's equally frightening if you think about the empowerment that these tools mean for people who mean to do evil to others and and you're gonna get both okay one of the Australia striking sentences you come out is the world virtual population well that number the people of Earth so we're kind of multiplying ourselves in virtual personalities and and one what you seem to be saying is that this material is going to this technology is going to extend us in this way but also that means invading us as well at the same time you talk about making the online experiment as real as life or perhaps even better and I think you said in the past in the future children will be asleep or online what's to day which is Chile children your child is online right now or asleep there are only two states of children now and if they wake up in the middle in life they're gonna be online people find that Chile I'm just reporting the news it's what you do every day well wouldn't you rather they were doing something not online well I think I think we're gonna discover that this generation of children is far far smarter than we were that the tools and techniques that they are able to adapt cause cognitive development to be earlier their communication skills will be better and surely their motor skills from gaming will be far far better so you know there's also talk of the development of Google itself away from a search engine I think you say suggestion engine yeah could you elaborate on that well let's talk a little bit about the future for the developed world and a simple metaphor for you which is in the book is you wake up in the morning and you of course you wake up with a clock that's been time to your REM cycles who you're woken up at exactly the right cycle so you wake up refreshed you look at the screen and the basic question you want to ask is do I need to get up so you say do I need to get up and the screen says no how does it know with your permission opt in all those kinds of things it's calculated that there's nothing that's going to make your boss really upset today the flights going to be late anyway you can sleep in until you sit there you go I don't want that yes you do you want that extra half hour sleep trust me and the the development of sort of infinitely intelligent assistance is in the path for companies like Google and others which make your life better and there's so many things that we can do now with artificial intelligence machine learning and so forth it really will change the way you interact and literally free up time today computers seem to be or they sort of harass you know this this problem and then problem and how to respond to that computers will get so good that they can actually more or less anticipate what how you should spend your time and again this is all opt-in all because you choose everybody gets upset about this thing trust me there's an off button learn how to use it right for me think of it as instead of having a person who's your your work assistant you have some computer that sort of helps you out it makes perfect sense so if you think about from Google's perspective the steps are there there's a product called Google now today Google now it's what if you don't program that which you can it starts by trying to figure out where you live and where you work so you turn it on and so far it's figured out where I live where I work and it tells me how long it's gonna take is that useful sure right if I programmed it it would be able to do a lot more I'm a bit suspicious of this word opt-in and you say in the book where people have a responsibility to read a company's policies and positions before they willing to share information we're not gonna do that and we we all get those screens come up which I scroll down and turn up to thousands and thousands of words long and we're unlikely to decide to take on your thousand or and our corporate lawyers in order to get an X gadget you co to me so we're not gonna say no I don't but I don't think you could sue us over it anyway I think the fact of the matter is you're superior I think under the legal system the first place those things are written by lawyers who basically think of every possible way somebody could sue you which is why they're so long yeah so let's start with that as a so it might give us some idea but have you studied the American legal system no I just live in fear of it the the point is that there's something in the book which it seems to conflict with that which is that one of the things you say is that when security as security gets you know develops and obviously this week there's been the terrorist act in London so it's it's something we're talking about as it develops people who are not on grid as you say maybe have a rougher time at airports maybe they won't be able to travel so in a way we're being blackmailed into this system so the opt-out is not complete well again you're creating a possible future scenario if you see a brand new expensive luxury home in Pakistan that has no connectivity whatsoever you might think it's where Osama bin Laden is right the fact of the matter is most rich people in these countries are highly connected for all sorts of reasons they have satellite dishes and so forth the fact of the matter is most people are going to be connected for whatever set of reasons and it may be that countries will ultimately largely ban having hidden people that the danger of having a hidden person I'm not I'm not arguing in favor of this I'm just saying governments may choose to do this because a hidden person is somebody who the police can't figure out what they're up to and in this new world maybe that will ultimately be important maybe maybe not I don't know but I want to go back to your opt-in he said I disagree with the framing of what you said the at the end of the day online services like Google depend at a basic level on the trust of their citizens so if we violate that trust we will in fact lose you as a user so a terrible thing that Google could do would be to take the information that we've accumulated about you and have it by accident or because of an error you know it was a bad employee make that public that would not only that would destroy Europe's you'd be very upset with us but the whole pounce pounce on us in a big way so independent of the law and this privacy statements all that which everybody wants to argue about we have a very strong incentive to care about your privacy to make sure you're comfortable with what we're doing and obviously we make decisions which are rough judgments so once every once while somebody typically in Europe not in Britain announces that we're going to have to do opt-in for every single service and every single page so if you think about it what's the user the user interface of that so every page you get you have to opt in next page you have to opt in next page you have to opt in so that's generally known as blindness in the term and what happens as you begin to be blind to the fact you just click click click click click and so that doesn't strike me as a good solution to the people who have that concern I think the general answer is that the online world at least in the sort of democratic world the services are voluntary in the sense that you do have choices officially not monopolies in that sense and if you do have a choice you have a choice to have a competitor in Google's case to be precise we make it extremely easy for you to take your personal information from Google and put it in a competitor's site very part of our policies yeah I got my personal information from Google I thought I was 15 years older than I am as amazing it's explained a lot about that so I was getting the you'd say but you do say as in a social contract users will voluntarily relinquish things they value in the physical world privacy security personal data in order to gain benefits that come with being connected to the virtual world so in other words there is a trade-off well there's absolutely trade-offs and and the fact of the matter is that the technology that our that our industry is producing naturally had a gathers information about you does everyone here know that your phone knows exactly where you are yeah do you know why emergency services anyone here opted out of your mobile phone because it knows where you are it has to know where you are that's how the system works it's the same principle but it's for the emergency service that wouldn't be regarded as a loss of freedom I personally I regard privacy as an aspect of freedom to be free so you'll say we trade a bit of for who we are but it has to be clear that in the book and I'll say here again I'm very concerned that we're going to lose our privacy over time that we have to fight for it and if we don't fight for it we'll lose it and the reason has to do with the logic of security right so here in Britain not for these horrific terrorist bombings that you all had you adopted the CCTV system which the majority of British citizens are comfortable with America does not have that and the CCTV system is relatively thoroughly regulated as best I can tell so that's an example of a model of a trade-off of security and so forth there are analogous things that you could imagine online in Google's case for example and everybody should know that we retain the search history that you have when you search on Google for somewhere between 12 and 18 months that amount of time was determined by the European Union and we just said yes it's an arbitrary number and that's an example of a trade-off between your privacy and the ability for the legitimate police and other public safety functions to figure out what people are up to I'm not going to take the position of whether it should be 12 days 12 months or 12 years but the fact of the matter is that's how it was sorted out those are decisions that Google should not be making the Henry Kissinger you talked to in the book and he's somewhat dissident from some of your points yes one of the things he says which relates to what we've just been talking about is that he could not imagine the Churchill or a de Gaulle imagined from that emerging from this connected world he says unique leadership is a human thing and it's not going to be produced by a mass social community that is that is correct and that is indeed what Henry Henry told us we went to see dr. Kissinger precisely because we wanted to get a perspective of somebody who was at a geopolitical view that was different from ours and roughly summarizing his view is that leadership turns out to be very rare in human societies he's a fan of de Gaulle he uses him as an example these leaders are very rare we were talking about the Arab Spring in our observation is it's much it's very easy to start revolutions now everybody gets together on Facebook and Twitter and so forth have a little crowd get excited have a few you know have the police overreact have the government who they're clueless anyway over-reaction up down the internet boom out goes the leader you have a new country not that complicated right that's really what happened after years of oppression bad behavior police state he can lack of economic growth lack of opportunity for college-educated people it was time for that system to go who replaces it well our observation is that it takes decades to develop leadership skills to lead humans right decades to learn how to speak to inspire to Americans would say to lie to you know all of the things that we say that - I'm not speaking for Britain it just takes a long time to develop those skills and so a 25 year old who is a truly brilliant executor of a revolution is probably not going to be the next president of a hundred million person comforted our country for that reason and an indeed that's what you see with Arab Spring so now you've got a real mess because you've got heightened expectations because everyone's now online everyone says ok good you know we've had the party now we want to actually grow we want to fix these things and then the really hard part of building a country which is by the way an independent legal system respect for the rule of law curtailing corruption free and fair elections figure out what the Constitution says these are extraordinarily difficult things for any society to do and on internet time they're almost impossible to do and you make the same points in two different formerly er in the book where you talk about loss of heroes in fact it's very hard to imagine given that we're now recording the lives of every single human being starting at birth what they say where they go what they do forever right by the time they're fifty years old and there are these sort of national figures and we know every single sentence and so forth and so on and misbehavior especially when they were 15 they were drunk and they should have been I mean how will society react that we've never had this problem before but it's quite it's quite a significant one I think what forward well how how will leaders emerge from such a situation is that constant well leaders will emerge you know Bill Clinton said I didn't inhale right Barack Obama said I did inhale and I enjoyed it Michael Bloomberg said the same thing so the fact of the matter is societal mores may change it may be that it may be eventually be that people will say just ignore all the stuff I did below the age of like 22 or 25 or something like that I'm much more concerned about this transition period here's an example today shortly in America and I think here as well you're tolerant of juvenile mistakes so you have a small run-in with the law that kind of stuff you can largely get these things expunged from your record but there's no way to get things expunged from the internet in the book we say that there is no delete button right and I give you another example in a second so the fact that there's no delete button means that there's this instantaneous record so what happens in America for example is an employer here you are your 24 year old you're highly educated and the employer record says look a great resume and a great schools great GPA and all that kind of stuff and then they spend all their time looking on your Facebook profile and they say this is the last person I ever wanted my company now is that legal absolutely should it be legal that's a question that governments are gonna face give you another example a gentleman in America decided to publish the plans to build using 3d printing we should talk about in the book a plastic gun that's largely on largely undetectable there's a relatively crude weapon but it does work and it will kill people in his brilliance he uploads this to the internet and it gets copied all around the world the US government in their usual fast acting style wakes a few days and then discovers that exporting guns of this category is violates a munitions law and the order the site to take the into this information down okay so at the moment all of the most evil people in the world right in all these random wacky countries have plans that will allow them to using 3d printers make guns that can be used and smuggle through airports to kill people now did this gentleman commit a crime I don't think so did he commit a human moral crime you betcha yeah we really did because there's no delete but there was a floor with a gun that required a nail to be put in it I go in so it wasn't completely exportable through well presumably you keep a nail in here so you know they don't x-ray your shoes there and by the way nails are generally available in most countries has to be a particular nail but my point my point about the the gun is that is that there's gonna be another brilliant idiotic stupid guilty person who will next year upload a better design thinking that he's making the world better by publishing ways of killing people how is this a good thing because people don't understand that this information was published cannot be retracted the book is a very broad look as if you are sort of talking about the governance of the world in the future and you're pretty skeptical about politicians as are we all that you have and this troubles me slightly because I'm not quite sure what you're saying this virtual world or the Google world of the world is relative to current centers of power I know he's Larry Page your chief executive said suggested I couldn't tell me if it's not true but I read it sounds of extrordinary Internet company should not be subject to laws older than 50 years he also talked about settings are setting a company up on an island away from the meddling god I've never heard those quotes so we will use our favorite search engine check if somebody in the audience could check that what was the exact quote let's actually check it Larry Page said Internet companies should not be subject to laws older than 50 years I believe it was illegal and somebody check if that's actually true this is the benefit of okay yeah we have one we have one gentleman here at the front show me the search result and you can use Bing it's okay you can use being asked questions about Google well in any case I won't comment on on the alleged quote the let's start by the the statement that the world's gonna get connected and that people are going to be empowered and I'm quite sure of this the number Android phones nine hundred million activations which means there's more than a billion smartphones there's roughly two billion users of the internet today there's roughly seven billion people on the planet so that says we've got five billion to go by our current estimate somewhere between the next five and ten years the vast majority they're running five billion people will join the internet almost exclusively for their smartphones so you go through what then happens well obviously governments have a lot to say about citizens behavior and some governments will think this is fine certainly Britain will promote this America will grow at this Europe is promoting broad digital literacy broadband all the sorts of things what about countries that don't really are not really soaked together are they're not running quite the right way they're gonna be afraid of this and we worry and we talk about this in the book that China could for example develop an export business of its censorship China today has what is known as great Chinese firewall which censors the results that go through into into China and back out and they'll shut down the connection if it has information for example about Falun Gong etc the list of things they censor is illegal to publish but I can tell you there's religious religious movements and things which are embarrassing to the senior leaders that technology could easily be exported in sort of a minerals for censorship trade so we worry that when that occurs it should if it occurs the Internet becomes balkanized and by balkanized I mean the fact that people have a different experience and I'm quite concerned that humans do pretty well when they don't know what they're missing in terms of information in China the censorship system seems to work in the sense that the average Chinese person is not aware of what they're omitting and they seem to be able to do just fine Jared and I and my daughter went to North Korea and I figured you know you'd go to Korea you'd see all these people sort of you know starving and with pitchforks against the windows and so forth and so on I mean you have this expectation of human disaster because they don't have access to information you know they're being treated mistreated in all the ways but in fact you know mom's taking the kids to school gentlemen going to work and so forth it looked like a reasonably orderly society you of course don't see what's missing so I worried that this trend of government's trying to sort of shape the Internet in their own image another example you know you come up lights of examples imagine a rock which was where Jared and I both were and my daughter Iraq decides to solve a cue the Kurd problem by simply segregated the Kurdish internet to its own thing the best example are the Iranians where we decided not to visit because it was too dangerous and the Iranians announced two weeks ago that they did not like Google Earth so they're going to have Iranian earth an Iranian man an Iranian earth is an excellent product and it omits Israel I mean what do you say to this this is the stupidest thing ever just staying on the subject of global politics I mean a global conflict a couple of things that nice if you develop 20 as you say robots and drones will increase conflict around the world but will decrease the likelihood of war another is that it will there'll be fewer genocides but more more harassment and more discrimination fill that out let's go through the genocide example this relatively easy it's easy to understand we went to Rwanda Jared had been a seminal book on the 1994 conflicts so I learned all about Rwanda both from him and from the people on the ground and also their president his victorious leader in the fight roughly 750 people 750 thousand people were killed in a four month period by machetes in the most brutal way possible the only way that can happen is with planning you know it doesn't happen randomly don't just say oh let's wake up and kill our neighbors of the other tribe had I do the thought experiment it's imagine if everyone in Rwanda mobile phones and they large leader today and obviously they didn't twenty years ago we would have known somebody would have leaked the plans somebody who said hey these guys over here are planning to kill all their neighbors something would have happened to either stop or lessen the sort of terrible things that would happen during this conflict with respect to the notion of robotic war it looks to us that there's gonna be a series of gradations of war so for example with China it looks to us like China and the United States are going to have a pretty serious code war as we call it so it's sort of a thing of it as a cyberspace war tryna attack Google for example it is alleged I don't personally know that America is doing things to China as well and on and on and on it's gonna go on on and on and on whereas whereas in the physical world China and the United States have relatively good relations given the differences in their systems lots of money going back and forth lots of travel relatively open borders etc and sorry you stopped before I was expecting you hmm so the the the this point about you make about well first of all about the nature of technology itself which comes up in the book you're on page 66 you say the central truth of technology industry is that technology is neutral that people are not and then on page 21 hundred and twelve we say technology companies export their values along with their products now these are contradictory statements unless I'm misunderstanding well again perhaps perhaps as the author I did not quite get the paragraph right let's start with a statement that technology can be used for good or evil and so in my industry people tend to say the technology is neutral I would say the technology is neutral comma and has an empowerment bias and an empowerment bias by the way I do not mean that as an only positive bias it can also be a negative bias in other words it empowers citizens in particular and I think over the next five or ten years we will be reacting to the empowerment of citizens and also people who weep receive as idiots right oh my god of course this will be great for newspapers because there's always a crazy person doing something stupid that they can cover and say oh my god this occurred this occurred this occurred and the rate at which such examples will increase because numerically the number of crazy people will will be added when we originally built the internet it didn't occur to us that there be any crazy people on it and indeed I might the first network that I built when I was a graduate student only had passwords in clear-text it didn't occur to us that thing would even steal passwords that's how naive we were now we're not that naive anymore but it gives you a sense of the bias the bias that we had with respect to the second quote we argue and this is a somewhat self-serving argument about Google that one of the best ways to change a society is to have well-run global multinationals whose values you believe in that you support in those countries so Google for example will not discriminate against women in the workforce we're roughly meritocratic and I think that's pretty well established it's illegal for Google as a US company to engage in corruption or something called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act so we and there's a lot of evidence when we want around and I'm not trying this to Google Suarez too many other many other global companies including many British companies they're one of the greatest ways to change as a society is to infiltrate from within with a new set of values because these people in these countries are they're humans just like us they're just trapped in the wrong system so if you go back to North Korea when we went to North Korea how gonna deal with the problem then or three other sort of the Hermit Revolution nobody wants to talk to them they don't talk to anybody they hate the Chinese and they're dependent upon the Chinese the embargoes don't work because they're full of Chinese goods that and goods from other countries that have been smuggled through China we were taken to a shopping center that was full of American products which by the way had brand-new equipment women staffing it and of course no customers because there was no money in the country it's a purely purely fake store how do you do how do you change the society you change it from within and you change it by infiltrating the country with new ideas what's the best way to get those new ideas on to the mobile device they have mobile devices all the internet all the country has to do was turn on the internet they've chosen not to right after we left they turned on 3G roaming three weeks later they turned it off again what's to say I'm going to disagree with you on both those points um the the technology is neutral it seems to me to be misunderstanding who are technology you can claim that science is neutral it's a difficult claim and scientists struggle to maintain it and they very seldom succeed and and it's it's charged for objectivity but as soon as they turn away from the bench and as soon as they are in the world things happen they've got involved in things now technology is the application of science mathematics and so on so it can't be neutral it's a decision you take to predict would use this particular thing I mean when you design an interface it ceases to be neutral it's a design to do something I think we're talk about neutrality in terms of you see I understand the distinction you're making the one of the things that's always a surprise to technical people is that human beings don't don't do what they thought that they were going to do with their product so that's where we come with this technology is neutral with empowerment in violence we offer these products up we want people to use them well but evil people will use them too there's example after example a fun example it has to do with Bluetooth the people who design Bluetooth which is the network that goes from your headset to your phone it's a very simple network very low bandwidth did not think that it would become the peer-to-peer network to smuggle out the images of the Green Revolution out of Iran but the way we found out the horrific things were happening in it in 2009 was that people used Bluetooth networks to smuggle to smuggle the information to a border point and then they got it out from there so people are remarkably clever in these countries yeah and but but this brings up to the the other point which is that you can't be making neutral technologies you must be making technologies to sell advertising there are well you just have the same fiduciary responsibility well I can answer a Google question are very simple Google has a group of people who make ads and they're clearly selling ass google has a set of products which are ad supported which are clearly commingled if you will guilty in the sense of the tone of your question and then there's a set of groups that have nothing to do with ads let me give you an ad for a product which is nothing to do with ads which is Chrome if you care about security you should be using Chrome this is the strongest browser if you care about speed you should be using Chrome if you care about price you should be Croat using Chrome because it's free and by the way it does not itself come with any ads that's an example you do a lot of things flying company today gathers up solar power together yes but you do a lot of you diversify a lot the things that it's it's easier if I simply say that Google does by virtue of the founding and the structure of governance of the company the company famously says we do things which we think matter that will make the world a better place so we assert the right to spend lots of money on products which don't carry ads because we think that people will like them now if we spend lots of money for a product that doesn't collect ads that nobody likes then that's a terrible error right but you're making these products so that you know this isn't feeding into the bottom line as such he's probably I can assure you we don't Google News for essentially forever and ever had any never have any ads whereas Google Shopping did interact with Google Shopping we went from a free service to an advertiser essentially an advertising paid service we make this is a kind of metaphysical position for Google that it has these values that will cause you to be corporations have a personality and a culture and when you found a company you found it typically with the founders attitudes right and in tech the companies sort of the personality of the company is highly highly correlated with the founders or the early leaders and the reason by the way has to do with selection bias right the the sort of top technical person top salesperson has a choice of which company's so they see the ones that are romantic and the ones which are technical and the ones which are aggressive the ones which are sort of kumbaya you know and they fit themselves into that sort of personality the google personality is very precise and well-documented which is that we want people who believe that there's a greater mission to what they do and that we focus on solving the problems of end users it's not perfect we make mistakes and they're the press of course it covered those exhaustively but the fact of the matter is that's how we mission and there I can tell you that in the decade I was a CEO and now for two years as a chairman every day there's an example where we make a trade-off in favor of a user and against revenue I'll give you an example of China right as far as I know we're the only company to have given up the revenue opportunity that was represented by search in China because we were unwilling to be censored by China China is a very big place as a lot of Chinese people there's a lot of advertising revenue that we gave up because it violated our basic principles there's a kind of elephant in the room where you've led into the room there which is that the taxation sure because you could perfectly well say that if for those are your values and you should be paying the taxes well we are paying the taxes that we're about to you're going to enormous lengths to avoid them and you say that is your fiduciary duty well Louis since you brought it up let me let's talk about what about the international tax regime and I'm somewhat perplexed by this issue so and I'm happy to answer more questions you know on this so the international tax regime has existed for decades and American companies have been structured like this for decades the international tax regime also applies to British firms operating in America you know European firms operating in America and it goes something is something like this depending on exactly where you close business exactly how you operate you pay taxes in those countries so the software industry evolved to the structure involving Ireland which has been again very very well documented and this is perfectly legal now if Google were not to have done that we would have opened ourselves to significant criticism and more in America because we're supposed to operate that way and so then how would we account for the difference is that a donation again I'm asking as a question I don't know so we adopted that model I don't think companies should make decisions about taxes I think the taxes decisions should be made by governments and so if the government here changes the tax rules we will follow and furthermore I'll tell you very clearly that we love Britain we're investing heavily we have 3,000 employees we're adding another couple thousand building a huge Centre in Kings Cross we don't need lots of things to people we're doing all sorts of things too because we actually look we actually like like Britain a great deal the fact of the matter is we would do that regardless of the tax rates but so yeah I mean sorry just one last question on the tax white person you Google probably pays a much lower proportion list of taxes than anybody in this room nah not globally I don't know okay UK but again I'm answering your question in the context of the international tax regime yeah so you're right in other words I completely did the record I completely agree with you this is a government issue and by the way I should say that no rational computer scientist would ever have designed the International tax regime this way right it will defeat your logic trust me I've never met a rational computer scientist well computer scientists like structure and order and that simple spreadsheets and so forth this is not what it is this is how it works yeah but I mean you've said and we want to discussion about tax you what do you think it should be a debate what how much more tax do you think Google should be paying if you weren't CEO to the taxi to say how much tax to pay it's up to the government to say we're not chairman it executive chairman and Google in this moment I I would have to sort of look at it I mean I honestly don't know and I'm not gonna make something up one of the problems in Europe is that you have widely different tax schemes of among the European Union members and they make money up in other way so you have a low corporate tax rate in one area and by the way we haven't even gotten into all the Europe all the u.s. issues around European tax rates and the fact that they're not harmonized with respect to the US rates which is another sort of morass of tax issues which with people here won't care very much people in America would so my position is figure out what taxes you want to charge us we will pay them not that complicated my place taxes should not be voluntary that's why they're called taxes by the way do you have an identity manager do I personally have one no no well in the book we talk about the problem of identity you said you talked earlier about digital identities how many digital identities do you all have if we count the number of email addresses login names that differ and different services you provide probably more than one would that be fair right maybe five this gentleman says more how many ten twenty twenty you have twenty the Sirius OS as a volunteer already you must you must be you must be an early adopter of important new technologies so so and because of that we're not gonna go to a single digital identity for many reasons partly because I don't think you want the government to have only one way to interact with you certainly America that beats you probably here as well but also they do different things so go back to your question about digital identities and you'll have multiple think about the country of Iran you have 70 million people they're busy trying to sort of prevent people from having real internet freedom so the solution in Iran is that you each person has a digital identities so that from the government's perspective it looks like this five hundred million digital citizens even though there's only 70 million and people use this to evade the restrictions by the government and so forth and so on so you can't quite tell right how many people really represent this movement to it so it is good by the way to give the Iranian government a hard problem here because they need to figure out how they're gonna open up their government and open access and open up things and similar things will forever okay I'm going to open it up to audience now other microphones yeah there are microphones please wait for the microphone and I'll point out - oh it's not with the guy next to you hi Eric thanks for coming I wish good many more successes the future this question is about when you said it's something wrong when things are good the society is created in the image of the comments of the nation-states how do you think that is worse than trying to create the whole world in the image of the corporate companies the only difference is the nation-states operate within the constraints of nationalism and the companies operate still put in a set of other parameters like corporate nationalism in light of that question can you also answer how far are you willing to go in terms of defending righteousness like the example you gave us you stopped the services in China when you believe that your principles are not applicable will you will you do it when every other continent is going to do the same between being sustainably profitable and righteousness what's going to be a choice thank you well I would argue that in China we proved what you call the righteousness which for us was an application of our principles if we were faced with the same choices today we would do the same thing in another country if that's I hope that's a clear answer it's probably a mistake to speculate on other kinds of moral questions that governments can come up with but you could speculate that there's a lot of different scenarios that governments could come up with which we would find would be so counter to our values as a corporation with respect to this question of nation state versus country nationalism and corporate nationalism I think it's important to remember that as a company we are subject to many many laws in many different countries that differ and so we have large sets of groups who try to remind us that this is legal in this country and illegal in this and they're particularly sensitive in the areas of privacy in hate speech so in America hate speech is obviously despicable what is legal there are many countries where certain forms of hate speech are not legal in some countries it's illegal to criticize the founder or the King so Thailand for example there's a series of laws which are brutally enforced in Thailand where you're not allowed to speak badly of the royal family or the King there's no rules in Turkey about the Fant and the founders name is Ataturk and so we work with that as best we can we view that as sort of a tolerable problem all right sort of work through it but ultimately the way the government solved that problem is they shut down Google they arrest our employees in Brazil of ahead of our Brazilian operations spent an awful lot of time in both civil and criminal cases over activities for which he had no responsibility and we try to sort those things out yes sir Eric I've been the other ohmy Toro me jr. for seven years at Google so I had the pleasure to hear you speak and multiple times and I know that as a technologist you have a lot of interesting opinions also about a topic that's really important to me and I think to a lot of us and that's an environmental issue all this technology in the future will and won't come really to fruition if we don't solve that problem and I wanted to hear some of your thoughts about the top so you are you referring I'm air about energy a couple a couple of comments the first is that you see the cost of having open and free speech which i think was invented in britain last time I checked when you look at the people who are fighting against the data or on climate change in America because there's this tradition of having two choices you have 99.99% of all the people who've looked at this data including myself on one side and you have crackpot on the other and the two are in the same TV show welcome to America so let's posit that the co2 levels are rising that it's a very serious problem that there needs to be coordinated global action and that we need to come up with some new solution so the first thing is what is Google doing here we've made a series of commitments about being carbon neutral we're building new state-of-the-art data centers there's a lot of evidence that that IT electricity use is rising which you can use renewables for that and so forth and so on we've also invested near a billion dollars in renewable energy products products and services and investments which should be good financially as well as good for the environment so I'm here to tell you that it should be possible for each and every one of you to behave as a rational business person a sophisticated consumer to make money and make some progress on this and again that's counter to what a lot of people think but I think it's largely true I worry that we're on a bad path here and the reason is that we can't answer the court having now wandered around two-30 countries and talk to people they all want what we want what we have excuse me and to deliver what they have the total energy loading that they need is significantly higher than they have today and I don't see a good global solution where we tell them they can't have cars it just doesn't strike me as likely to work so we need to come up with some new solutions in the same sense that fracking which is essentially a technological invention where though the pipes can now move sort of arbitrarily through the ground to find the gas and the oil wherever it might be we need some new ones around around much more fuel-efficient engines much more fuel-efficient cars there's evidence with both wind and solar that wind and solar are getting to the cost near the cost of coal at least for new bills and that's very very encouraging as a gentleman up there hi thanks coming and speaking to us today I'd like to draw on a point that you made earlier and gave us an example of how do you define what a country is what country is run well you said it's very easy for you to say that China doesn't line up with your values and Britain does for instance with free speech but what happens when it gets great well we struggle through them every day and I used the examples I'll give you three examples Pakistan Turkey and Thailand in each of those cases they have shut down YouTube for many many months in Thailand for example there was a video that was offensive to the king and under their law should be taken down it was taken down immediately they kept YouTube blocked for approximately nine months was that because out of sheer moral outrage in favor of the terrible destruction done to the image of their king by the 30 minutes that that video was on or was that because they didn't want all the criticism of the military hunter that was in charge of the time it was present on YouTube you decide I don't know but I'm suspicious right that they had another motive since they've since now opened up YouTube would have a good operation there and I think we work through that with Turkey we go back and forth spend a fair amount of time in Istanbul trying to understand this and it turns out it's illegal for you as a citizen and Turkey to get an unfiltered internet connection in your home or your business what's the definition of the filter well it turns out it's not written down in law I met with the president we went through this not even the staff could tell you what the rule of the filtering was it turns out it's a family filter what's the definition of what's appropriate to the filter not only is there censorship in their law but you're not allowed to know what the censorship is so that's an example that's an example where it's a little too close to the Chinese model in my opinion we work very hard and yelled at them and so forth that law is in place but it hasn't been implemented yet so again that's the reality of how this plays out how do you find us the Britain when this government came in actually did a set of things which made internet transparency and openness even more fundamental so I would congratulate you all to having gotten to the right answer after all you invented it they're big speaking of your relationship who in this government a government minister really recently complained that Eric Schmidt could get in easier to see Cameron than he could are you worried about the closeness Wow no I was the supporter of Cameron and George Osborne because I knew them personally and my friends in the US were extraordinarily shocked that I supported conservatives because in my world nobody does that right but I pointed out that the British conservatives were actually socially liberal believed in climate change thought women should be treated equally knew these shocking things in America there's a lady there that was next time so there's a lot of hands if you just put them up to it when the question is finished up there your conversation about filters is quite relevant at the moment there's a bit of fuss here about pornography and children's access and there's beauty sleep in a report setting out what view of the impact of this is on children others debate whether it should be a you know you should have to opt in or opt out what's your position on that the the problem of pornography is a real one and I think this report I have not read it but it's been described to me sort of lays out some of the negative effects of it and the fact of the matter is there is adult pornography on the internet because there are countries that allow it relatively freely and then it crosses the borders this is this no delete button example that we were describing earlier the problem that I have is I don't know how to build a filth filtering engine that would block this pornography you can't there's no technical algorithms that we can use to detect it people have tried by the way pretty hard so you end up in a situation where you're deleting DNS entries those are the names of URLs and the moment you start doing that you're putting in a filtering regime that could be extended to things which are not what we would in this audience agree is adult pornography in the arab world for example adult pornography is highly illegal but the interpretation in their laws of filtering or four countries by the way they do filtering and one for my another includes an awful lot of quote pornography which we would agree these political speech criticism of the king criticism of the ruling party so I worry with any conversation about filtering that it's a slippery slope I understand what people proposed it but since we can't detect the evilness of it if you will I worry it's a series of steps I'd much rather deal with these problems why better education my better understanding of the roles of parents those of you who are parents let's say you have a two-year-old I would sit down with your two-year-old tonight or tomorrow morning when he or she wakes up and I'd say I am going to know your password until you're 18 and when they're three you're gonna have their birth that you're gonna say the same thing when they're four you're gonna say I want to know your password in the eighteen so by the time they're about fifteen and they say why do I have to give you your passport from your entire life the policy this family has been I know your password that's how I so I would encourage a strong parental role pornography is just one example of harmful information that could be seen by children they could actually and if I if I had children of that age today I'd be all over this I think torn up fairly internet was actually created by a Supreme Court decision because in the late eighties a better about swear they classified hardcore pornography is free speech in America well the Internet is a global phenomena in date but and as far as I can tell pornography has been in this part of the world - yeah but but the American companies would not be able to do it if that Supreme Court decision had gone the other way and America is obviously the dominant force in the internet this is too much of a leak trust me Americans go to the continent and the the amount of adult pornography and the harshness of it and so forth and it's open to shocks even us liberal Americans so I would I would just disagree with their framing I think that the in America the there's a series of very famous cases which involved you know I can't define pornography but I know it when I see it which was the famous just Justice Stewart quote and there were a series of Prosecco finn's in more conservative states which were over overturned for that reason it would be very if you had such a rule today you'd still have to have a definition of it and since there is not agreed-upon definition because countries differ I don't know how you'd solve this problem okay gentlemen there hey thank you um in what way do you think the institutional monopoly on education will change in response to these brands named universities putting their degree courses and lectures online like MIT excellent so I know a little bit about the British system because I was involved in arguing that the British system was not producing enough computer scientists I wanted to take a minute and say that after a lot of discussion the British educational system has now made computer science hard sciences one of the sort of core sets of classes that university students have to do there's an insufficient number of computer scientists and sort of the science type people in Britain given the percentage of people there's simply too many smart British people that need to be in this that we're not getting properly educated and I think that's large have been fixed so that's a serious win for Britain and I'm very happy to have watched that in the last couple of years I can take you through the details if you're interested in the the question to me in America which I'm more familiar with in education is what's it going to take to really change the structure of American education because the organization's are remarkably indifferent and change resistant to data and so here you have professors and teachers who teach statistics and AV tests but they don't actually evaluate any choices they make they just decide all right they don't look at outcomes they don't measure them in any rational way and parents desperately want better educational systems for their students so there's a series of now online worlds where you can really test whether the kids are getting better education I'm on the board of something called Khan Academy which is targeted at 10:00 to roughly 17 year olds it's hugely successful if you haven't looked at it here it's very successful in Britain keh and Academy and it's essentially videos that the students watch at home and the classroom the theory with again modern and sophisticated teachers is they do group problem solving and there's evidence that that produces better outcomes than the traditional way and with teaching is done so if it's if it works great EDX is an MIT group there are a number of other for-profit ones one it's called Coursera these are in the process of doing the same things for universities right that they're now our global resources which you can compare and to me this is a real positive effect let's get a little competition of the educational system let's just get the teachers to prove that they're as good as they think they are teachers are incredibly important all right but let's let's have some measurements about outcomes let's get people the best tools let's give them career opportunities let's give them the tools that fits get the classrooms wired all of that together will ultimately produce a great outcome my observation about the educational systems is they're largely been run for the benefit of the parents and the teachers in other words for the adults and not the kids an education is supposed to be about the kids so let's measure the kids outcome figure out how we can make it better and iterate until we get world-class outcomes and and in case you you you think that I'm just sort of making this stuff up what's the competitive issue globally for Britain than for America it's the Asian educational model it's not Asia it's the Asian educational model you may not like these countries and they certainly are not places that I would want to live given my sense of civil liberties and rights and I suspect British people would feel the same way but the fact of the matter is they produce a higher percentage of extraordinary talented engineers mathematicians and scientists and that ultimately means technological innovation moves to there and ultimately perhaps global companies that could could provide even more competition cause more job issues and so forth and so on in our part of the world it's a very serious issue the next man up that I was just wondering if you ever worry about that the humanizing nature of some personal technologies I mean you just talk about education person just wondering yeah but you ever concerned um I would argue that most the technology is more humanizing rather than less so maybe you could give an example of what you mean good question um back at me I mean in terms of sight communication I mean you talk about digital personalities and people perhaps becoming slightly different individuals online or oil is creating you know different personalities for themselves in life is that slightly I'll let you then then come to your own conclusion on that I would argue that for decades people have assumed that you would end up having people sitting at home it was called Bowling Alone was the phrase the people would sit at home they'd be lonely they'd have their television the television would be attached to their head in some way they'd have no friends and they'd be miserable it looks like that's completely wrong it's a hundred percent wrong there's evidence that because of the new technologies which include social networks texting and so forth people have more friends than they did before they can span more than real friends who move well the Dunbar number is 150 people so from your perspective you should have at least 150 friends that's how according to the scientists that's roughly the correct number so the fact of the matter is I would say that certainly my reach as a human being is far far greater because I can email and text people and if you if you're confused about this go and watch a movie from 30 years ago before cell phones in before texting so I watched la story and that happened at two movies that I happen to remember from when I was younger so the basic thesis in the Manhattan movie is as a woman that has a lot of people trying to get to her well she has the telephone at home and she has to answer it because there's no caller ID and she can't quite figure out oh no no no I can't talk to you now boom right and so forth and so on you forget all right that with these tools and techniques you can decide how to spend your time and who with and so forth there's example after example pick some set of British comedies go back 30 years you'll see how much your life has changed lady that thank you and just to return to the tax issue you say that it's up to governments to make sure that companies pay tax and I I'm sure that's fine for a company that doesn't claim any great virtues but Google's made a lot over the years about it its virtues its values as a corporate citizen I think most people think that one of the manifestations of being a responsible individual or corporate citizen is to pay your way and you're wack as far as tax it's concerned and I think therefore that a lot of people are left with the impression that Google is somewhat hypocritical would you care to comment I'm not happy to as I mentioned the first days this why would companies not want to have high taxes just in general because they can then use the remaining money to invest and so Google invests an enormous amount of money in future and speculative projects which if the tax rate were for example 100 percent which you're not proposing and I'm not proposing and I assume the government wouldn't do would not occur so from a corporate perspective company we understand we have to pay taxes we have to follow them my conundrum is that if we pay more than the minimum right how do I classify that right so if you if you think we're behaving illegally which is false then you should investigate us and and so forth and indeed I'm sure that will occur but the fact of the matter is what we're doing is legal so anything beyond that that's taxes to some degree either we have to fear how to classify it and at least in theory for a corporation it could serve as an investment drag so there's no question that the government needs more money we're not arguing that and I think that's true in all of these countries so I don't know how to solve that problem right now I think the government should decide what the tax rate for a company should be and I think we should follow it well but the latest more that's my question and I think as I said I agree with you government should set taxes and so on but is there a sense in which this you Google's rhetoric since the beginning of being another a new kind of company a different kind of company with different values is running into a brick wall here because people are angry about taxes they're getting upset about everything doesn't make Google look quite as cool as it once did well that all I can do is show up and try to answer the question right the best I can and I'm not defending as I said I said with some ridicule I described the current system and that's about all I know how to do I could imagine lots of things that Google could do to make the world a better place that we've chosen not to paying more than the taxes that we're required is certainly one but there are certainly many other things that we could do it would also be highly beneficial to the world that we've chosen not to because we couldn't think of it or we couldn't get around to it or those sorts of things okay attention than that thank you I once I asked a question about Ray Kurzweil and your recent hiring of him as a as a director of engineering we had him over here as part of the MIT Enterprise for him a couple years ago he's a fantastic futurist his goal is to build a human mind according to his last book so I'd love your comments on that and just a tiny follow-up question is there anything to do with his hiring associated with the Google book scanning project as well so the good news is that you'd you ask the perfect question and I cannot answer that question the reason is that we don't discuss our future unannounced products but a reasonable presumption on your part as an intelligent number of the this sort of community is that we hired ray to work hard on the things he talks about thank take it one more at that and the second part of the question is that anything to do with the book scanning project can't answer that question either but I will tell you watch this space I would believe we're in the signatures but that's a more complicated question okay good I will take a whole hour to discuss what I would tell you is that Rey represents a set of brilliant people who believe that using the computational power that companies like Google have that we can actually get to a new level of intelligence and understanding he has built a team to look at this this is something that we're very very interested in it's very early to speculate on exactly how you would see it but raised record as an inventor says that he will change the world again I strongly recommend you read the review of Kostas book in The New York Review of Books by calling McGinn you might change your mind somebody please read it next one all right I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about Google's current involvement in education I think I've largely spoken about about what's going on in education Google itself is not heavily involved in the educational initiatives that I described that's an example by the way of things which we could spend a lot more time on but we've made which would make the world a better place which we have not we built a plant a platform which is called course builder which became the underlying platform for many of the experiments that are now becoming popular and indeed we were the sponsors of the first MOOC course a MOOC course is a course that's largely taught online with an AI course done by Google employees at Stanford which had a hundred and fifty thousand students in it that's extraordinary we sort of proved the point so we were there at the beginning I don't know how much more will do versus let the that let the competitive markets work themselves out there's a lady over in the corner that's here sorry this come on it's sorry commander sorry but no he's he's virtually in silhouette like yes thank you for that so my question was with to do with the comments on the impact of the internet on war and genocide so you can see the way that the internet kind of helps people from all over the world especially where it's free connect but in these countries where they have strict filters is there not a risk that you get dangerous propaganda almost by omission and you can can create propaganda that makes people want to go to war and want to hurt their fellow people I agree with that and let's use the example in Rwanda of this hate radio station that was used to actually signal many of the massacres and so forth and had that radio station been destroyed by the Tutsis and they no one quite knows why they couldn't find it or they didn't destroy it it would have saved significant lives my answer in general is the answer not to reduce the amount of information but to increase the number of information sources so in most of these cases if you have somebody who's all into hate speech let's get five other people who are into non hate speech and let's get people educated enough to understand that they should look at multiple choices that they should think before they act humans can be mobilized they can be radicalized they can be taught that there's only one way to do things that person is a pretty unsafe person people are naturally however curious and so if we can educate them it'll be different if countries shut down the way you're describing think about Syria today right was the internet has now been shut down there will be people who will build various mechanisms to get information out of their Google and Twitter built a product called speak to tweet where you can call a phone number and when you call this phone number Google's voice will then take your tweet and ship it out on here to feed it's the only way to get to at least tell people what you're doing tell people you're alive report what's going on that's had a huge impact so even those situations information is very powerful I think he's a man that won't hire I had a kind of two pronged question about what you're saying earlier about CCTV which was quite interesting because Google has just unveiled Google glass which i think is quite interesting and a question really a bit but what happens to the opt-out when it starts invading people's space so when someone else is wearing a pair of glasses and can be taking pictures of you at all times without you really being aware of it how did they what does that do to the opt-out when when technology starts to infiltrate the physical spaces we're starting to see now and we'll start to see up the next ten years or so so a little bit of background is that Google five years ago would have just sort of announced Google glass Google is different now and so with Google glass if you haven't used it it's an extraordinary product it's a little screen it's this up here you could talk to it you say okay glass and it talks back to you in your ear you do queries and so forth various people have figured out a way to get the camera that's in that to take pictures and also to show you what's going on there are many many many interesting applications that people are proposing with this your fear is right in that without knowing it you could end up with people recording without your knowledge and so Google has spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to release that those components without violating your privacy and there are extreme examples for example of face recognition where we've said publicly and all the peat again we're not going to do that without appropriate privacy safeguards in place it's too early to say exactly how we're gonna do that but that work is underway now and I would encourage people rather than assuming something is terrible what sort of a normal human thing these are real real innovations let's let let's try them let's see how they work let's see what problems they solve and some new problems that they may create and work with them at the moment there are only 2000 or so in the world and so we have some time or more at that hello I wonder if you could say where the saw a difference between knowledge and information particularly in the field of education I'm thinking I hope I've attributed this quote to you correctly but a while ago did you not call for geeks with Greeks that I thought was a wonderful quote and but but then you know when you start talking about the need to measure and outcomes well in Britain we've had decades of trying to measure an outcome things in education and to know great profit and so I wondered how you and quite often I think information and knowledge get confused so I'd be interested in your thoughts on how you saw the difference and secondly there's a lot of evidence that critical thinking is underlies all sort of knowledge the ability to manipulate symbols manipulate concepts this is true in reading it's true in problem-solving it's true an art you know can you think critically can you you express what you're trying to do can you understand the context in which you're operating and so forth there are new mechanisms to teach critical thinking that have emerged admit that hold great promise with respect to the measurement question I simply disagree that you cannot measure some of these outcomes and I observe that in society we're measured off time right we're measured by our families were measured by businesses were measured by schools and grades and so forth so we're better off figuring out ways to approximate measurement right to to here to different trombone players and try to figure out who's better to serve as incentives I do feel very strongly that humans will react to those incentives in a good way when they're done properly ethically that is literally my view you had a same question yes I did the second one was what what you thought about the lady could be urban previously mentioned the worries about pornography that have been in the news this week well actually the the report that Tim it's based on Falls much more into the field of advocacy research it was commissioned by the Children's Commission office with a problem that was prior you know defined beforehand and they set out to look for certain evidence that isn't conclusive anyway and I thought it sounds like you don't agree with the report no no I don't and I really liked your response to what you would do and it just struck me it seems a very sensible response and I wouldn't isn't that something most parents would would do and should do and why is it wait so sort of soap questioning and anxious about what we can do with this with this new technology that as you say has the potential to be so great so it seems to me there's a contradiction between the fantastic potential and an increasing fearfulness of ourselves or our own ability to use it positively well thank you well first but since I haven't read the report I don't know its provenance I can't comment on your your critical view of it I think we just have to take that as your view and and hear other people's views as well it seems to me that you there's a couple basic principles in life anything that increases life and decreases death is positive anything that increases death is bad anything that it gets parents more involved with their children is positive and whether it's fear or incentives or so forth we can debate maybe it's culture maybe it's religion but at the end of the day society is better with parental involvement trying to make sure that that all the trends are positive with respect to human life health safety and so forth and so on and let people come to their full potential whatever it may be it's a relatively straightforward position but I think it's right I do believe that the technologies that we're talking about are largely enabling of that goal and there are issues that we've been highlighting here that we need to address related by the rent sleeve that would be a woman must be leaving aside you know some of the issues that we've been discussing about terrorists sharing information pornography etc on a slightly more mundane level the Internet is littered with erroneous information things which are just not true if we step forward into a world where we're planning to automate off of information that is then based on what you can get on the Internet I'm not sure you know what the repercussions would be if you know the distance between x and y has been miscalculated online at what stage do we need to be thinking about quality control well of course you've just made a very good search a very good argument for a search engine our search engines you know it's the number of sites that turn up a non factual information on a regular basis is pretty shocking these days well the counter-argument I would make is that the number of sites that have factual information is also increasing quite dramatically so if they wander we didn't know how to filter them well again we're not into filtering we're into search that's called Google and so if we're surfacing factually false sites to a legitimate query then we're not doing our job right that's what ranking is all about and there are many many ways algorithmically to do that let me give you an example to make the point let's go back to the tobacco companies of 50 years ago in America and there may have been similar things here in the UK I don't know they were aggressively and they were ultimately convicted of aggressive misinformation campaigns they were spending money to mislead people that smoking was good for their health or at least neutral which it obviously is not and the scientists to create so today imagine this we started over and they were doing exactly the same thing what would happen is it'd be all these sites full of misinformation it'd all be factually false they would have lots and lots of sites they would do their very best to gain Google well two things would happen first the Google algorithms would get better to detect this sort of it's called Google bombing is the term of trade and the second is that right thinking people like the people in this room would in fact organize to say this is crazy right these people are trying to sucker you or whatever the right British term is and off you go right and then this system would equilibrator so given that there's no book that says exactly what truth is this is the best that we could do today with technology I also would tell you that the use of the Internet is not a substitute for human judgement I get emails all the time of did you know right so for example you gave a quote which didn't sound like something Larry would say so I asked to check right and so we can discuss that but the fact of the matter is that's the right behavior let me just read and what's the source of this Larry Page is tired arrivals wants to start his own country it said it was crass I'm pretty sure - when we got him but I cut them pasted it okay I'll read it thank you for what happened last week while I was traveling what one more one more up there please I use Google but I don't trust Google and from what you said earlier it sounds like I'm pretty unusual and I'm curious as to how unusual I am in that regard I find it quite difficult to trust an organization that's got such a huge amount of power over the information we bring to people's attention today and with that power go it's a huge amount of responsibility and it's quite a mere sister who would you trust instead that's a good question I guess and you can ask your question that's my question to you thank you well if you can answer my question first that would be great go ahead go ahead and ask your question and and just as an aside that adweek Europe recently law partner was speaking on the Levinson inquiry into press freedom and I asked him the same thing about Google and the power that it has over the information that that we're now all consuming and he said well the chats that Google are very very nice he said I know them quite well and they seem to be doing a great job he said but I would ask them to prove it and so my question to you is how can you earn my trust so that I know that your search versus filtering device that you're using is not corrupting anyway the information the on search that I'm receiving from you well I can so I can actually answer that question and then I would like you to ask my answer my question so so there's a let me tell you how Google works by policy and so forth we take all the information that we can find on these crawls and we organize them using algorithms that are the best ones we can and we work very hard to not have biases and those algorithms then you could imagine to be lots of different kinds of biases so the Google search results are the best that computers programmed by humans using modern incredibly sophisticated algorithms can provide there's certainly no intent to discriminate or otherwise hurt information and indeed we are criticized for the inverse of what you said all the time which is that we should omit information so I think you can trust Google at least as a presenter of information to have done the best we can to get all of the information and rank it and keep it all there even if you have to go pages after pages after pages does that answer your trust question or there are there did I misunderstand your trust question no I understand how the algorithm works but what I'm saying is at the end of the day because of the nature of your place in the market you know you are just a sheer number of people that are relying on you to bring information to their attention is absolutely enormous and with that level with that number of eyeballs looking to use together to get news you do have a responsibility so my question was do you ever do you have a global for example a global panel of experts that you take through how you're changing the algorithm which is changing as people change the way they create sites and so forth yeah we do 800 or 900 tests changes a quarter the changes are checked very thoroughly using all sorts of ways involving review panels a B tests and so forth to see we also they help me to mention because we're running out of time just go yeah but we have we have a person who does not trust Google and I'm trying to get her to trust I may fail but I intend to try I'd like to receive by email the information that you're talking about about how you do that and that would be a great first step okay well again let me say I do want to try to answer this so when we make changes and we're again we're not perfect and we do make mistakes we actually look at the old versus the new and we have the user panels and citizens around the world when we do these we do them in per country per language and so forth and so on and we have a very very sophisticated review process that looks at precisely that and we've done that since the founding of the company I just want to come to one last question I'm sorry I don't at one point doesn't the fact of a suggestion engine rather change that the suggestion engines are are different technology let me describe how suggestions in work people here have used Amazon I assume Amazon will if you buy a product will suggest other products you've seen that the general term of suggestion is engineer called associative matching and what happens is they say that if you bought X and other people bought ax they also bought Y and so you might like Y and you can do this mathematically in x times y times Z you can do it with many different kinds of products and so forth and so on so the various forms of suggest are a simple form of artificial intelligence where the computer is trying to be helpful that's distinct I think from the trust question because this suggests is simply trying to get you faster to your answer whereas the trust question which I thought was important was about completeness and ethical and honesty and arrangement ok sorry we don't have to have thought the ranking you get first page or is more directed to you as a result of that that is essentially the suggestion engines have nothing to do with that ranking if you are logged in as a Google user and you don't opt out of the personalization which you can do you will get somewhat more personalized ranked answers because it'll know for example which country you're in it'll know a little bit about your search history most people are happy with that if you don't like it you can turn it off okay if the the personalization aspect is relatively mild but if you compare to people using Google you will in fact see some differences in their outcomes precisely because of that ok I'm sorry this really has to be the last question no-no-no let's hit the mic so everybody can hear you thanks that in your book the young there's an impassioned plea that you give that we must fight for our privacy or well lose it and my question is what shape in your mind does that fight take and who's on which side and how we know who won that's a very good question I don't know the answer I observe that it's very easy to give up your privacy for other reasons right so I mentioned here I am in Britain and I walk down the street my pictures being taken it's not being misused as for as far as I can tell and the police use it honorably I have lost some privacy there right it doesn't particularly bother me but it does bother other British friends that I have I might be willing in Boston after the horrific bombing there to opt in for the same system because of the horrendous trauma of the bombing that occurred at the end of the marathon so my point in that was to get us to debate it the Hawks always win from the standpoint of surveillance and safety and because you can't calculate the cost of fear and the asymmetric power of evil evil people it would be easy to put yourself into a situation where you ended up in a surveillance state not Britain hear what I'm saying I'll give you an example in the course of our travels and we mention this in the book Jared Jared and I and my daughter indeed again I want to a place called plataform of Mexico now we also went to see odd-odd Juarez which for a while was the most dangerous city in the entire world which is a serious win in terms of terror so in ceará whereas for example the police are in such danger that the police who were with us wore face masks so that they could not be identified and then killed by the corrupt police so it's quite something to operate with where the police are are far hooded protecting us with machine guns and all this kind of stuff so the reason they they have this problem of course is the terrible drug war and all the money going to the US and all the drug customers in the US this is a terrible problem and it's screwed up the police force on the government's and a lot of there's a tremendous amount of corruption so the government in its infinite wisdom has built an underground bunker literally below ground secured in all sorts of ways where when there's a traffic stop they can using modern AI technology figure out who this person is and who's their associates is in enough time for the traffic stop to radio to the police person that one he's in danger in two he should do his very best to arrest this person really fast before everybody gets killed this is a very serious problem exactly the same technology could be used by a future Mexican government to survey and trap innocent civilians otherwise doing other things it's the same technology so what I don't know about Mexico is does it have the history of free speech of privacy of individual rights that countries like Britain and the US do or are they willing to it's the drug situation of Mexico so bad that they're willing to give up even those rights and I worry about that and that's why we said it and I think that the the reason it's good to frame it this way is that these are ultimately societal choices and societies will decide them in different way but every country faces this challenge going forward okay ladies and gentlemen thank you very much thank you you

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 26,492

Keywords: Intelligence Squared, Debate, great oratory, Intelligence Squared debate, speech, top debates, best debates, most interesting debates, educational debates, intelligence2, intelligencesquared, is debate, iq2, iq2 debate, iq squared, Eric Scmidt, Bryan Appleyard, Jared Cohen, Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, Google, Internet, Productivity, motion technology, Google Ideas, cyberterrorism tdimhcscire2qi, talk, event

Id: etmarYifipE

Length: 88min 27sec (5307 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/apmTech]

can someone who has watched this write down a few of the most interesting bullet points, Im really pressed for time these days =(

[u/Simcurious]

Not an Eric Schmidt fan, i don't think he has a good grasp of the future. Well better than most people, but not enough to make these statements.