I want to tell you guys what I did this weekend.
I installed Google Home Mini, and I started to talk to my computer.
Hmm.
I'm of the generation where talking to your computer was a sign of insanity, and to find
out that Google Home Mini not only knew my name, right, but could start to answer very,
very interesting questions was for me a transformative moment.
If I go back to the last, over the last year, we can talk about lots of things here at the
conference.
We have 7 products with more than a billion users, we're uploading 1.2billion photos
a day, YouTube is 500 hours of video uploaded per minute, we've now mapped every single
country, all 200 of them pretty thoroughly, we're 100% renewable globally in terms of
our total corporate energy use, which is a very large number, but I think what's even
more interesting is what has happened in the field of artificial intelligence.
Let's take a look at cancer.
For breast cancer, a high school student in Chicago has used tensor flow to solve a new
problem to breast cancer detection, skin cancer, Stanford researchers are using tensor flow
to do better skin cancer than dermatologists, diabetic retinopathy, a disease that causes
premature blindness in many, many Americans and a huge number of people in impoverished
worlds, part of the world, it's a major source of blindness, we can now detect that with
huge accuracy compared to what humans can do, predicting medical events, hospital care,
all of these are being transformed by this technology.
In science, it's even more profound.
Gene sequencing, we can now, we have a model, gene sequencing has a certain number of errors,
we can now detect accurately one base pair out of 250,000 correctly.
So we're close to being perfect in something that matters for scientists.
In chemistry, we can actually predict molecules, properties, based on their shapes just because
of all the molecules we've seen.
We're using in marine biology something I care a lot about, we're using tensor flow
to track again the movement of all of the different mammals that we can understand underneath
the ocean.
In conservation, we now have an online tool where you can use machine learning to study
the predictive effect of conservation.
We have something called Project Sunroof where you can sort of figure out the solar loading
and whether solar will work for you and of course we encourage it.
We took one billion videos in ten languages and translated them into the languages that
deaf people can read and all of a sudden opening up all of that content for them, again, done
automatically.
Our voicemail transcriptions have been cut in half.
We're using neural nets to do handwriting recognition as well as reading emojis, if
you can imagine that.
It won't surprise the women in the audience that there is gender bias as in movies, our
tool detected it's a two to one bias, that's an example, creativity, we have something
called the AI duet you can play with which will allow you to play the piano and it will
help you in case you need it and I certainly need it, drawing, we now have drawing assist,
to give you an idea of what you want to draw, it will draw it much better, and alpha go,
a game of go, many of you know what it is, not only did it win against the top human
in the world, but it's also invented new moves that had not been understood and strategies
in a game that had existed for 2,500 years in Asia, I can go on, I didn't know it was
a hard problem, but sorting cucumbers is difficult, we can do it automatically more efficiently,
that improves farmer productivity, and it goes on and on and on.
If you want to see this technology in action, go to Google photos and type hugs, and it
will show you pictures of hugs in your photo album, or dogs, even though you haven't labeled
them.
How does it do that?
It's seen enough pictures, it knows it.
The progress that's occurring so fast that I think this will go down as the year of transformation,
it's literally the year where it started big time.
And here we are in Arizona, where we are doing testing of self?driving cars in a nearby town.
You can imagine, take a look at gmail reply, real personal assistants that can help you
get through the day, do I choose this or that?
We're seeing all these fundamental science breakthroughs that I talked about.
It's interesting that computer science is now the largest major in most of the leading
universities, so Princeton, Stanford, MIT, so forth and so on.
With a higher and higher percentage of women.
These computer scientists, when they come out, right, when we graduate them, and thank
God they're incredible, they're going to build platforms of understanding using these tools
that we can only imagine.
Now that we've seeded the network of technology, now that we've made this code Open Source,
now that we have these super computers that can actually run this stuff, this next generation
will build systems that are unimaginably intelligent to make us smarter.
What does all of this mean?
So the most obvious question is the jobs question.
We'll talk about that a little bit.
My answer is pretty straightforward, every business person I talk to has a very large
number of open jobs, which they can't fill because they don't have people with the right
skills.
Take those people, give them these tools, their salaries go up, they can fill those
jobs.
It's not that complicated an argument.
And the math works.
And more importantly, because of global demographics, there will be a jobs surplus, that is, more
jobs than people because population is in aggregate beginning to decline.
So for all sorts of reasons, this technology becomes fundamental to humanity for economic
growth, job growth, knowledge, peace and so forth.
Now, there's lots and lots of challenges.
Industries don't like being disrupted by software and they don't like it for all sorts of obvious
reasons, no one ever and they don't like the impact on them, but no one adds up the
jobs that were created elsewhere.
These systems, by the way, are not necessarily perfectly precise.
Much of the AI work is still imprecise, it has errors in it, so you wouldn't use it for
completely life?critical thing, at least not in its current state, you would have a human
part of the conversation.
People are much less tolerant of errors by machines than they are of humans because we
all understand humans are fallible.
With my Google Home Mini, which is an extraordinary product, so I wonder when a child comes up
and discovers that Google Home Mini is far more patient than his or her mom or dad, right,
what is the impact on that?
That's a pretty awesome responsibility for our Google Home Mini team, right?
This is just a good metaphor for what happens when these systems are conversational and
helpful and so forth.
But in any case, why does every crisis have to be confrontational?
Why can't we just sort of figure out AI role models in this case, that puts this together?
To me, there is an awesome power, right, in all of this, of shaping both human events,
human thought and so forth and so on, that our industry is facing.
We saw this with the resolutions, we've seen it over and over again we've seen this
with the Russians, we've seen it over and over again, it's important that our industry
get this right with the values that all of us sort of we the people model that we have
for our conference today do it.
Now, why am I so fundamentally optimistic?
When I think about the next ten years and I talk to entrepreneurs all day, the number
of new billion dollar corporations that are being founded today based on the underlying
platforms that we and other companies have built is astounding.
The transformation, the efficiency, the scale, the impact, the improvement in service across
supply chain work, distribution models, estimating risk, fraud, you name it, this technology
is incredibly powerful.
Many, many people in this room are part of it.
Take a look in food.
Naturally grown indoor food, free of pesticides, free of things that will hurt you.
Impossibly good health monitoring through your phone, right?
We and other companies are working very hard on this.
The CRISPR revolution and whatever follows it, which George will talk about, in that
part of the world, they use these biomarkers to try to figure out what biology is really
doing.
When you do that at scale, you can use these scales to come up with new insights.
The educational issue, which has been the devil of all of us and we're all frustrated
by it, is about to change.
We have entrepreneurs here, one I know very well who has articulated we're going to use
this technology to completely change the way we learn, right?
People don't necessarily learn in the way that we were all trained.
Maybe people learn in different ways, in smaller segments with more interactivity and we can
determine that.
In chemistry, building new compounds and materials, optimal management of energy systems and logistics
of distribution, if you care about energy management and climate change.
If you don't care about climate change, you can at least make the energy more efficient,
modeling of proteins, other biological systems and so forth, all of these core platforms
are being built now.
The most exciting thing that I get to do every day is to try to imagine what will be built
because of those platforms.
What's the good?
And by the way, what's the bad?
They're not perfect.
These are powerful systems, and we obviously need to work on the good ones and try to deal
with the bad issues as well.
To those of who you are entrepreneurs in the audience, what I would say is, my favorite
quote is from Henry Ford: When everything seems to be going against you, remember that
the airplane takes off against the wind.
Right?
That these platforms are sort of a wind, right?
It's sort of a system that you navigate in.
And that the power of the young people, the ideas and the values that we try to incorporate
in the way we run our conference and our company, I hope we all agree are the right ones.
I could not be happier to be back, and I'm so glad you guys are back, and enjoy the rest
of the morning.
Thank you very much.