>>Eric Schmidt: I want to talk a little bit briefly about
the state of the world, and then I have the privilege of introducing a number of very,
very distinguished people.
I want to ask the question, how many of you have used Google in the last 24 hours?
[ Laughter ] >>Eric Schmidt: I just wanted to see that.
It made me feel better.
[ Laughter ] >>Eric Schmidt: Okay.
Sorry.
Next question, next question.
How many of you who have children, anyway, are pretty confident that the world is going
to be a much better place for them than for you five years, ten years from now?
Not that many.
And with respect to those of you who raised your hands, I disagree.
I think that there are many reasons -- if you look at the studies, somehow, the country
is in a funk; right?
Working ourselves into this state.
But, in fact, the data supports a much more optimistic view.
And that's what I want to take you through.
We're connected to each other in ways that are very hard to understand and anticipate.
But we're using these connections to strengthen the world in ways that we can get excited
about, that we can strengthen the invisible ties that hold us and bind us together.
The unique things that make humanity move forward are now present right before us.
What's interesting is there's this whole category of people who complain that in new generation
of people who grew up living in front of screens, always connected to something, are somehow
giving up something of life.
I think they're completely wrong.
Right?
The story of humans is connectivity, verbal, and now with computers.
And it is the construction of all of that that this connection is a blessing; right?
That it is that platform that will create the great set of new wealth in the world and
all the opportunities for us.
Now, one observation is that networks are really changing our world.
Think about it.
There's increasing returns to education.
There's increasing returns to global brands.
You see that, you'll see that in our conference today.
There's some not-so-good examples.
There is increasing concentration and power in elites.
Right, we just went through the worst economic crisis in 60 years, partly because of this
concentration.
And there's all these serious and long-term problems that people keep talking about.
I made a list.
Lack of global demand, permanent group of young people jobless or marginally employed.
A growth in percentage of service sector jobs displacing or not able to produce manufacturing
and other kinds of jobs.
Lack of efficiency in government.
Issues around unions and union management.
The problem of democracy, union -- individuals vote for their self-interest and not the common
good.
The loss of the traditional role of the media and the fact that occasionally, political
systems can actually fail.
They can really fail, with terrible consequences.
So these are the backdrop of the things that we're talking about.
But then look at the solutions that we have before us.
How many times have you spent -- I've spent 25 years -- people talking about fixing education?
It's the same conversation every meeting.
I stopped going, by the way.
And now, just now, we see the explosion of new ways of doing education K-12.
I'm on the board of Khan Academy, for example, but there are many others.
And a whole bunch of ways universities will change to serve the world.
And furthermore, it will bring competition into an industry which has never had it.
And competition is always exciting but ultimately will produce better choices, better innovation.
Think of all of these as version 1.
Think of what they'll look like as version 5 as we learn how they work.
Universal language translation.
How many disagreements -- wars, conflicts, prejudices, and so forth -- have ultimately
been because people could not communicate?
With Google technology and others, you can now literally, obviously, translate 100 by
100 languages.
But you can even speak into your phone -- right -- and this, of course, is the basis of everything
going forward.
I should mention it's Android phone, four to one over the iPhone, but nobody ever says
that.
Speak into your phone and have it automatically translated.
The servers in the back do the translation.
It comes back in the other language.
It's extraordinary.
This is really magic.
Imagine global financial asset tracking.
One of the biggest problems of the developing world is corruption; right?
Well, we can actually track all of that stuff now and figure out where the money is going.
And with the proper legal systems, we can actually put the bad people in jail and/or
deal with the political system that's so corrupt.
We can establish a principle that people should have choices, and we can measure that they
have choices, which is ultimately how efficiency occurs in systems.
We can sort of recognize that innovation is inherently disruptive and that most of the
new ideas comes from small businesses in the U.S., at least two-thirds of the economic
job growth comes from small businesses that are growing fast.
And we can know things that we didn't know before.
You know, you have some global food program and you can actually now ask if the food got
there because they can send you an SMS back.
Shocking.
We can actually figure out what the supply chain for something important really looks
like.
So when I look at this, rather than looking on the negative -- and there's certainly issues
-- I try to list all the problems that technology can help solve.
Well, you've got the education problem.
You've got the corruption problem and the illicit network problem.
We're working on that at Google.
You've got the terrible tyrant problem.
You've got the small business growth problem.
You have the language problem.
You have the energy problem, which I have not talked about, which is causing a revolution
in the United States, and a real possibility of self-sufficiency in our energy future here
in this country.
And the bad government problem.
That's pretty good.
We should work on this.
And, indeed, you are.
Now, political systems and governance matters.
I don't think that technology is the only answer.
But the technology changes the conversation in so fundamental a set of ways.
Which is why sort of we turn to you as sort of the current and future leaders of this.
We need you to step up into that space to solve those problems, because those are the
problems that define the global problems.
So what does the technology of the future look like?
And keeping in mind that predictions are a way of looking foolish; right?
So you always have this problem.
I don't think we have to dream what the future looks like.
If you actually look in the labs at Google and in other companies and in other research
labs, you can see a glimmer of what the next five to ten years are going to look like.
Imagine a fully integrated living space around you.
You wake up in a bed that decides when to wake you up based on REM sleep.
By the way, these devices all exist today.
And you get into your driverless car, self-driving car.
It's much safer, by the way, to let the car drive you.
Really, really truly, it is.
And it's going to happen in our life times.
And of course, you'll use voice recognition, because you still can't text, because they'll
never change the law.
And you'll have instant transcription and all that.
And all of the things that you spend all day, the routine stuff that gets in your way, should
I go here and there and I wish I had a secretary.
And was I supposed to call this person?
And so forth, will all be handled seamlessly through various forms of artificial intelligence.
But the real breakthrough for people like us, sort of the well-to-do in the information
sense of well-to-do, will be that there's a whole new generation of robots coming along.
And these robots will represent us and do gesture recognition.
You'll send your robot -- I don't like to stay at night.
I'll send my robot out to go to the party and they can represent me.
[ Laughter ] >>Eric Schmidt: You know, it's much safer,
too; right?
And he'll have a good time and he'll report in the morning.
And you think I'm kidding.
There are companies building these social robots right now.
And they are uncannily powerful.
Your life is centralized, your small tasks streamlined, leaving you more time to tackle
the big tasks, all that kind of stuff.
To me, this is exciting.
It's what we do and so forth.
I'm very proud of it.
But that's not the real story.
The real story is what happens to the other people, all those people that we never talked
to because they weren't connected.
We now have 6 billion mobile phones in the world, more than a billion of which are smartphones.
If you do the math on Android, 500 million Androids today, shipping 1.3 million activations
today, do the math, you'll see there are be quite a bit more than a billion of these phones
in people's hands.
That penetration into the world has huge impact on that's lives.
And we talk about this as though this is life-changing for us.
Imagine going from no information to all the world's information with one device.
No textbooks to all the textbooks.
No entertainment, all the entertainment.
No language, all the language.
Right?
It's more than life-changing.
It's a day that you'll remember for the rest of your life if you're in one of these places.
So in a situation where more than half the people don't live under democratic governments,
the nondemocratic governments better fear that this new empowerment technology is going
to change their political systems in some ways that are really exciting.
You know, and I think people are familiar, village fishermen and women keep the fish
on line and wait until the price in the dynamic market gets better.
These people are clever.
We always sort of think we -- we anthropomorphize them as not being the same as us.
They are.
They just don't have the same tools and education.
They'll use these things, and they'll change their word, making isolated people get connected.
Digital data changes societies.
You can measure stuff in a way you couldn't before.
You can actually figure out where the money is going, how people are getting educated,
and what they're doing.
Newly discovered talents.
How do we know?
Maybe the people who do design in Botswana today will turn out to be the best UI designers
for the next generation of computer UI because of some unique talent, geography or training
is part of their artistic system.
We're going to find out.
I'm not sure it's Botswana, but I'm sure it will be true for somebody.
Because we have not explored this innovation.
So think about the new opportunities for collaboration, parents to educate their children.
Any child who cannot attend school can be literate.
Imagine these courageous people who are making laptops for people who don't even have connectivity
that are preloaded with all their language-specific learning so we can address illiteracy globally
and solve it completely throughout the world.
These are amazing things, all occurring right now.
Coming back to us, what about medicine?
We have a group called Google Ventures that's done some investment in this area, Bill Maris
is here, who is an expert in some of this.
I was talking to him.
Some of the most interesting things that we have can be brought under control, diabetes
and so forth.
You will -- voluntarily, I might add -- take a pill which you think of as a pill but is
in fact a microscopic robot which will monitor your systems and Wi-Fi out what is going on.
You laugh.
If it makes the difference between health and death, you're going to want this thing.
One of these was just approved by the FDA.
And think about what this means for chronic sufferers, the ability to monitor, to figure
out what's going on with your elderly parents and so forth.
But the best part is, once you're in these systems -- and there are now these transdermal
monitoring systems that connect to phones that keep a track on you -- the phone calls
the doctor and the doctor calls you.
Perfect.
I'm fine.
The doctor calls you if there's a problem.
And we really do know.
So the change in terms of the way in which we operate our medical system, the knowledge
that we have, and the ability to have good and high-quality long life is phenomenal.
But if I think now, more than five or ten years from now, I think about the distant
future, and I'll finish up by saying a couple of things.
My real predictions are that for the things that bind us together as humans -- DNA, science,
the human spirit -- I think we -- it's -- we're going to know so much more about this as global
knowledge grows exponentially.
There's this a sort of meme that everybody thinks that things are slowing down, it's
becoming more complex.
This is not true.
Discoveries in scientific, medical, so forth, discoveries in other countries, are now immediately
part of our Zeitgeist, if you will, named after our conference.
The simultaneous science means that core learning grows ever faster.
This is an unalloyed good.
It really is.
The global science has sort of no restrictions.
We're all locked into the same physics, if you will.
Furthermore, the globalization that I'm describing means thousands of local experiments.
And smart people, including some here in the room, will then use that as a Petri dish for
new social experiments, new ways of governance, new ways of solving complex problems.
You know, human systems are messy; right?
They're not analog.
They're not perfect.
People do unusual things.
But if you get enough of them in enough countries, you can pretty much figure out what's a good
way to address a good or a bad thing that you care about.
And the most interesting thing is that this will create a set of sum -- I'm going to call
it a sum of rising expectations, as sort of the elite countries that get this thing right
will get better and better and stronger.
And I'm quite convinced that the connectivity will put enormous pressure on the poorly run
countries, in particular, the autocracies, the kings, the bad governments, all the ones
we talk about all the time.
And their citizens are going to put enormous pressure on them to fix their systems.
Now, in technology terms, we call this a forced upgrade, right, that they're really going
to upgrade, because they're going to be forced to.
They just can't continue in these anarchic systems.
But to finish and put a perspective on this, I would say that, eventually, technology just
disappears.
It's interesting if you think about it.
Ten years from now or more, the ultimate achievement of what we do is, it just literally disappears.
I don't mean it goes away.
I mean it becomes imbued with everything.
This is what's happened with the previous generations of this kind of technology.
And, you know, the old quote of, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic."
Well, I would propose any significantly widespread technology ceases to be magic.
Think about it.
To me, Google Earth, still magic.
Google spelling correction, still magic.
But we take it for granted, "Oh, yeah, we always knew how to do that."
By the way, we didn't.
Some very clever people invented this stuff in the last decade.
So in the future, people will spend less time trying to get technology to work, no more
ports and prompts and plug-ins, because it will just be seamless.
It will just be there.
The Web will be everything, and it will also be nothing.
It will be like electricity, which we take for granted now, which 100 years ago, people
had conferences like this on to celebrate and to fight over AC versus DC.
If we get this right, I believe we can fix all the world's problems.
Because all of the reasons, we have knowledge at our fingertips and all the ways that we've
talked about.
Just because we know everything doesn't mean our problems go away.
The future does not just happen.
I wish I could tell you there was some algorithm or formula to solve it this way.
It doesn't work that way.
Computers can do amazing things.
Those things in your pocket, these devices, the defining platforms of this next age, they
contain power inside them that's unimaginably interesting.
But they have speed, they have memory, they have so forth, but they do not have one thing
that we have.
They have -- they don't have a heart.
And, ultimately, the connections that we forge, the digital ties that bind our humanity together,
that's not possible without technology, but it's also not possible without us, without
our hearts.
We have a heart.
And that is the pulse of our future.
It's the users who will change this world.
That's you, that's us.
And that's what we're doing together.
As long as we have you guys as partners, as long as we can do this together, we're going
to make this world a much better place.
And I'm very excited to be doing it with you.
Thank you so much.
[ Applause. ]