Alphabet Executive Chairman (Ex-Google CEO) Eric Schmidt’s Talk at UC Berkeley

Eric Schmidt came down for a talk at UC Berkeley on 10 February 2016, and I was lucky enough to be visiting UC Berkeley and managed to catch it.

I took down most of the stuff he said and thought that I would share it so everyone else can learn from the insights he gave. (:

Questions asked by UCB Chancellor Nicholas B. Dirks

What advice do you have for students who want to learn computer science but don’t want to major in it?

Well, what do we know about success? The most successful graduates were curious, did multiple things, they followed their own intuition, they hanged out around smart people and they had a good time. The more cross disciplinary you are, the more innovative you are, the more curious you are the better. As a life lesson, I would want you as an undergraduate to use your own judgement and analytical skills to judge claims. There is both a data explosion and a BS (bullshit) explosion — your responsibility is to sort that out.

At Google, when people make statements we check them. We have a fact-based conversation. The objective of google is to make you guys smarter.

You mentioned hard problems in climate change, health care, education. Where do you see the next big moves in the world of tech?

For the last few years, it has been a breakthrough. One big move is in deep neural networks and reinforcement learning. You build networks that are trained based on an objective function.

We have come close to the stage where someone can speak to the phone in one language and it can come out in another language almost concurrently. Improvements in speech technology is because of this technology. And it is because of data.

How do you think jobs will be affected?

This is definitely going to affect jobs but not necessarily negatively. Repetitive jobs will be done by machines, and humans would oversee that, human judgement is still important.

When philosophers thought of what it meant to be human, they would compare humans and animals. Now we compare humans and machines. How do you think technology will change what it means to be human?

Well, we have a long way to go. When we ask people what they want of a robot, they say they want a robot that can go to the kitchen and do the dishes. We are still far from that. We have a robot that can do the dishes if you put them inside, that’s the dishwasher. But we are still far from a robot which can go to the kitchen and organize everything.

It’s possible that systems can get good enough that they can mimic human behavior without having the essence. We don’t entirely have a proper definition of consciousness so we don’t know exactly how to build it.

We are at the beginning of an enormous revolution. Imagine a tool that made everyone a little bit smarter, and it’s free. It’s got to be good. Having people be more intelligent is an improvement.

We take for granted mobile phones. If you are in a rural village in a developing country, a mobile phone is life changing. That single device is your channel for improvement, it is how you become relevant in the global age.

The global marketplace of impact and scale is something we have never seen before.

Google X has been working on project loon — how is that developing?

I have been trying to get the whole world connected. I feel that if the world is connected it is a more peaceful place. Fibre is amazing in that an enormous amount of data can be transferred, but not all places are able to afford the installation of fibre.

Some engineers have figured out how to have an LTE signal from a balloon, and these balloons work.

Because Google can afford these things, we can make people’s lives better.

What advice did you give Pope Francis?

Pope Francis is a remarkable individual. I was blown away by him. He is very focused on the relationship of technology and humans and human values. He is trying to make sure that technology is operating in the service of humankind. Given the fractured nature of global politics, and that almost everyone is unhappy with their politics, somebody as the Pope can serve as a unifier of human values. I think we need them, and I’m speaking as a non-Catholic.

There are huge issues in the world, and we are more aware of them, but awareness is not the same as the solution. I was on an antarctic expedition and the temperature has gone up by 7 degrees. This is bad news for the glaciers. This is no joke. It is a crime to allow this to happen. It is incredibly important. You and I will probably not be affected by this too much, but poor people will. The Pope is very concerned by the people who will be hurt by this, in particular the poor. Just want to say, climate change is actually happening, it is actually true.

What do you think about freedom of speech and the presence of hate speech?

We should not censor the internet. A tiny minority of people are issuing threats — that is not okay, we should not accept that. My argument is that the tools will get good enough that we are able to identify the sources of hate speech, and society will figure out how to deal with it. As the Internet has become more mainstream, it has become more cleaned up. The systems of commenting and taking down has allowed us to have proper debate. Can we build systems that can identify hate speech and decide what to do with it?

How do you see the developing debate about the use of online education?

The triumph of cities, the tightness and crowdedness of people together is a part of the winning not the losing. Economic analysis indicate that various forms of creativity are accentuated by cities by 30 per cent.

How do you think think about the future in terms of support for research?

Research budgets are being cut/questioned.

….. In summary — Eric Schmidt feels that research should not be cut and that more money should be given to research.

The best investment a government can make is in core research and core education. You need to give universities enough money to support their students.

60 to 70% of VC money goes to Silicon Valley. To shut off the start off the pump is madness.

What are your thoughts about the Autonomous Vehicle industry?

There are 31,000 highway deaths every year. 1.3 million people die in car accidents every year. If you could cut that by a factor of 2 or 3, think of the number of lives you could save. It has been difficult to work with the regulators on this. I think we have a regulatory crisis where regulators are not sure how to mitigate risk.

Any tips for humanities folks for entering the tech sphere?

The tech space has a lot of non-technical roles. There is a very large space around digital marketing. Your generation spends a great amount of time online. Generating virality and demand — we are just at the beginning of that. It is very important for you to take the “computers for poets” type class so you understand enough how to do simple html programming.

What are the biggest challenges you face in rebranding google with Alphabet?

It is our objective to develop separate brands. We now have these business units that are held to the standard of proper businesses.

Regarding the Google library project, you made available the great works of the greatest universities. There were issues with copyright. What is the situation now?

Summary — We did face a lot of issues with copyright, but we achieved our objective of getting the great historical works online.

What do you think is the next generation of the computer?

You started using a smartphone only around 10 years ago. Now, you touch your smartphone 1500 times a week. You probably have your phone plugged in next to your bed every single day. Mobile, mobile, mobile. The mobile industry is still growing, and it is not stopping yet.

My guess is that the analysis of data will ultimately create something else in the future, and we will find a name for that.

Hope you find these notes interesting/somewhat of use! (: