1:21
think of no better place to talk about the kinds of things that we want to talk about

1:24
in Germany and Berlin than what we’re doing right now. The—you know, it’s interesting

1:30
if you think about Germany, think of Germany as the innovation center, maybe one of the

1:35
great innovation centers of the world. You have more patents than anybody else. Think

1:40
about the German success, the German miracle that exists today; the fact that you’re powering

1:48
much of Europe and much of the world recovery, and in particular, much of the—much of the

1:53
growth of Asia and so forth is coming from German engineering and German manufacturing.

1:57
So we have a long history of innovation, of accomplishment, and of success that all of

2:03
you—that all of you can be very proud of. And I think most interesting is that as college

2:08
graduates, graduate students, researchers, as best I can tell, you have the highest probability

2:13
of getting a good job of anywhere around in the world because of the success of the country

2:17
around you which I think is a testament to everyone here. So, I wanted to make a couple—I wanted to sort

2:26
of start—I wanted to start with a couple of—a couple announcements. And I think the

2:30
first is that, we’re—Google, of course, is doing very well and we’re going to add more

2:35
than a thousand people in Europe this year; including hundreds of people in our Hamburg

2:40
sales office and our Munich engineering center, and some of the programs I’m going to talk

2:44
about here in Berlin. So we are investing big time, if you will. We intend to make sure—we

2:51
want to reflect the culture and the heritage and the accomplishments of Europe and, in

2:56
particular, of Germany, and we want to invest here which I’m very happy to say it’s important.

3:01
Another thing that we’ve announced today—it’s not... Another thing we’re announcing—I’m

3:06
sure you can’t actually hear it. Maybe we should just use something—you want to try

3:12
a different... >> Another one.

3:14
>> SCHMIDT: Try different one? >> Just go on.

3:20
>> SCHMIDT: Okay. We’ll try a different solution. >> Take this one.

3:28
>> SCHMIDT: Perfect. Another thing that we’re doing is actually announcing the creation

3:34
of a whole Internet and society research. And the idea—should I go over here? Yes?

3:53
Not a German microphone. Okay. We’ll figure it out. Today, we’re announcing an Internet

4:04
and research institute. One of the things that—in spending sometime thinking about

4:11
Germany, the German culture, German academic culture, you have a long history of academic

4:17
debate and that history, I think, is pretty fundamental to the way your society has worked

4:22
pretty well. We want to participate in that. We want to actually fund the center, literally

4:27
to the tune of millions of euros to discuss and debate the evolution of the Web, the Internet,

4:35
public society, public debate and so forth. And I think that will make the Web stronger.

4:40
I think it will make the German understanding of what’s happening stronger and I think it

4:43
will make Google stronger by being a participant along with all of the other Internet companies.

4:47
I’m pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty excited about that. We’ll just have these—we’ll

4:55
have these—we’ll have these little gaps. So... Here we go. Should we try a different

5:09
one? Okay. We’re going to try... >> I guess this one is with a cable and that’s...

5:15
>> SCHMIDT: No, I think it’s the cable. Let’s see if we can shake the cable.

5:19
>> It’s more secure. >> SCHMIDT: More secure?

5:21
>> That’s it. >> SCHMIDT: Yes. This is called wireless interception.

5:23
This is—this is the benefit of wired versus wireless. Okay. That’s what I would tell you

5:31
in any case. And then the third thing we’re going to do is we’re going to announce a 10,000

5:37
small business initiative to try to make sure that small businesses here in Germany can

5:42
take advantage of the Internet. I like that idea because we all understand that the job

5:48
creation engine is ultimately from small businesses. And it’s still the case that many small businesses

5:53
are not fully using the Internet for eCommerce and things like that. We have a program that

5:58
we’re rolling out here in Germany to do precisely that. And then, perhaps the most important

6:03
thing I wanted to talk about is an announcement of a product called One Pass. We have been

6:09
worried as many people have—has been that it’s been very difficult to monetize, to sell,

6:16
to make money from newspapers. What’s happened, of course, is the Internet has come along,

6:22
the Internet is perceived as free and people who are working very hard to produce very

6:27
high quality have not been able to get paid properly. We’ve tried various approaches;

6:32
so advertising and so forth, and they don’t completely work. They certainly don’t work

6:37
well enough to provide a robust infrastructure, if you will, for comment, for research, especially

6:44
for investigative research. This is not a problem in Germany. This is a problem everywhere

6:49
in the world. It’s a problem in the United States. It’s a problem all throughout Europe.

6:52
It’s a problem in Asia. And so, Google developed a product which we call One Pass and it’s

6:58
actually a technology that allows the publisher to decide to charge or give things away for

7:05
free. If you want to give things for free, that’s great. If you want to charge—if you

7:09
want to charge for the information, you can charge for it on a one-time basis or on a

7:14
subscription basis. Now you say, "Well, wouldn’t it be great that everything be free?" Well,

7:17
of course, I love free too. But the fact of the matter is there are things which are very

7:21
much worth paying for and we’ve learned that people will pay for them for the same reasons

7:25
that they’ll pay for newspapers and magazines, and so forth and so on. And so we built a

7:30
system and—that we’re, in fact, launching here globally from Germany, here in Berlin

7:36
for the first time that allows you to do this for all of the content that we care about;

7:40
that literally, anything that people would like to charge for, give it a go. Give it

7:45
a try. And what’s interesting is it works with existing print publications. So if you

7:50
already have a newspaper, a newspaper is very important, you can add this to your newspaper

7:56
subscription approach and everything works. And more importantly, the publisher is the

8:01
merchant of record. We don’t keep that information. We don’t prevent you from knowing, if you’re

8:06
a publisher, who your customers are like some other people. So, all of a sudden, right,

8:10
we’ve got a very different approach, very publisher-friendly approach, and we basically

8:15
don’t make any money on this. We do it as a cost basis. We make our money on advertising,

8:20
of course, so don’t worry about us. The most important thing—the most important thing

8:25
is to get money to the people who are producing the high quality content because the high

8:29
quality content is what you’re going to the Web and what you’re going to your mobile devices

8:33
for in the first place. What I’m particularly pleased about is to say that there are three

8:38
significant publishers here in Germany who are participating and, in fact, announcing

8:42
this with me. They are Axel Springer, Focus, and Stern, some of the major magazines and

8:47
newspapers here and publishers in all of Germany and for the global—in fact, the European

8:51
world. So thank you so much for the three of you for helping us work so hard to do it.

8:55
And they’re right here in front of me, so thank you. So with that as sort of an opening, I wanted

9:08
to spend a few minutes—what I’d like to do is talk a little bit about the future and

9:11
then take your comments or questions. And I’d like to start with the observation that

9:17
people are confused about the Internet. They somehow think that something bad is happening

9:25
when, in fact, I think something extraordinarily good is happening. And when I look back at

9:31
what has happened in the last decade, the tremendous number of this and that and all

9:36
of the inventions, I see a very, very good set of accomplishments, and I’m very proud

9:41
of having been part of Google during that period. And again, looking forward in the

9:44
next decade of mine at Google, it’s going to happen even faster. Even more things are

9:50
going to be happening because of the scale and the platforms that we have now articulated.

9:55
And what’s interesting is people are beginning to understand the pervasiveness of this. Here’s

9:59
an example. This is a quote from Joseph Scarborough who’s a columnist. Who is—he talks about

10:04
a world where computers offer a cold substitute to human contact. He’s a negative, negative

10:12
writer on this. "The technology is winning the battle against actual human contact."

10:19
And of course, he writes very well and I think he’s completely wrong. That, in fact, the

10:24
structure of computers is going to allow us to spend more time with each other and do

10:29
more of the things that we care about for precisely the reasons that I’m going articulate

10:33
for you. That we’ll be able to spend more time with the people that we care about to

10:39
explore new places and to have sort of make the world a better place. The technology exists

10:43
to serve us and not the other way around. So there are many, many examples of this.

10:50
A most recent example, everybody knows that in the last few weeks, there has been an extraordinary

10:57
revolution in Egypt. And during the revolution, the government did something that was unprecedented.

11:04
They tried to turn off the Internet. Big mistake. Don’t do that. And many, many people complained.

11:16
One of the things that we, at Google, did working with a number of our friends including

11:20
Twitter, is we put together a Speak-to-Tweet program. So that if you couldn’t get on the

11:24
Internet, you could call on the phone and you could say what you wanted tweeted and

11:29
we would tweet it out for the whole world to hear. Okay? Simple, easy to do. And I want

11:38
to—what’s interesting about this is this is not some idea that the senior executives

11:42
at Google had. And we didn’t sort of say, "People just did it. It was just their idea.

11:47
They just said, ’Let’s try this.’" And it’s an example of the power of our culture and

11:52
the power that—the power freedom and the power to be heard is so pervasive. What’s

11:59
interesting, by the way, is that particular tool was built by two engineers in one weekend.

12:03
That’s power. That’s impact. And of course, everybody knows what’s going on now. Hopefully,

12:10
it will transition to a much better—to a much better and more peaceful—more peaceful

12:13
lifestyle for all of the Egyptians. What’s interesting about transparency—and Europeans

12:20
understand this particularly well. The European Union has made millions of documents available

12:26
to the public through something called the Open Data Network. And again, you can now

12:29
search and try to understand what they’re up to. And if you don’t like it, you can criticize

12:34
them and furthermore, you can see if they tend to respond to your criticism or not,

12:39
right? But transparency gives you that power as a citizen. It’s very fundamental to how

12:44
democracy, at least in our view, work. Another example. This is another very interesting

12:49
trend. There’s a company called Ushahidi. It’s a website and they started off monitoring

12:56
things going on in the Kenyan elections; it’s 2008. Very, very clever people. And what they

13:02
do is they track what happens and they crowdsource the results. So they don’t rely on what they

13:07
see, they ask everyone; "You tell us what’s happening over here, what’s happening over

13:11
here, what’s happening over here." This principle of crowdsourcing gives us another way of seeing

13:17
what’s happening in the world that we could never do before: real time modern reporting.

13:23
So we did this with—in a different context in the 2010 Haitian earthquake; a terrible,

13:28
terrible thing. And using crowdsourcing information, we could figure out where people were hurt,

13:34
where people were in trouble, how to get them to the right medical care very, very quickly.

13:38
It’s being done right now with the famous actor, George Clooney, in a project in South

13:44
Sudan where the Sudanese government has said the following things are true. And by virtue

13:49
of using satellite monitoring and using crowdsourcing information from people on the ground, you’d

13:55
be amazed that perhaps what the government is saying is not exactly what they’re doing

13:59
with their military troops. What a shock, right? So again, the transparency, the power

14:06
of the internet and what you can do really does change everything. I’ll give you another

14:10
example. One of my favorite examples. One of our engineers is color blind. So he wrote

14:17
over a week an application which, using Android, changed the colors so that if you’re color

14:23
blind, you can see the colors the way you’re supposed to see them by looking through the

14:28
camera, right? A very, very simple idea, but one which makes everybody who cares about

14:33
that or needs that problems; life is infinitely better. So what is happening here? Why is

14:39
this happening so fast? I guess this is one of the questions. It’s because everything

14:44
is happening faster now. The growth of the mobile web, mobility and the things we’re

14:49
talking about is occurring eight times faster than the same growth that occurred in the

14:55
early ’90s on the original web. So not only is it bigger, it’s also faster. Interesting.

15:00
A few months ago, I did a calculation and predicted that smartphones would surpass PC

15:08
sales within two years. I was so wrong that we—that smartphones surpassed PC sales last

15:17
week. So much for me. It’s happening faster and faster and faster. Now why is this? Because

15:24
the utility is so great and there are many, many examples. The smartphone shipments grew

15:29
in the fourth quarter of 2010, 89% year over year. And here in Europe smartphone market,

15:38
you were the most mature smartphone markets. The Europeans are always ahead of everybody

15:48
else—always ahead of everybody else. And smartphones continue to do so. What’s interesting

15:54
now is that for many, many people in the world, smartphones is the only way to get online.

16:00
An interesting statistic is that more than half of African and South Asian subscribers,

16:07
the internet—the only way to get to the internet is on their smartphones. And so imagine you’re

16:11
a person who lives in a relatively poor village, you’re very intelligent, but you don’t have

16:16
a lot of information, you don’t have textbooks and so forth, how important is your phone?

16:20
You think your phone is pretty important now, imagine how important your phone is to them

16:25
on a 24-hour basis everyday. Now what’s interesting now, of course, is everything is connected.

16:30
So when you see a music device, if the music device is not connected to the web, not very

16:36
useful, because all your music is on the web as well as on your sort of device. Take every

16:41
device you have and imagine connecting it to something; connected to the web, connected

16:47
to Wi-Fi on and on. That’s all happening in the—in the next few years. And all of these

16:52
are occurring because of the pervasive data connectivity that we’re all experiencing.

16:57
There’s a standard called LTE. LTE, again, quite a bit developed here in Germany. Germany

17:06
is the leader in LTE deployment. Many people within Germany have access to 50 megabits

17:11
or higher, so I’m very, very jealous. You’re seeing this in other countries. Australia,

17:17
a country which has always been far away, has decided that 93% of the people in the

17:25
country by 2018 should have a hundred megabits or greater. It’s become a public policy under

17:30
the new prime minister. The other 7% will have to make do with 50 megabits. The European

17:36
data initiative, the European leaders that you have in Brussels have announced that it

17:41
is a right, or a goal, or whatever you want to do it, that by 2020 at least half of Europeans

17:47
will have access to 100 megabits or greater in terms of connectivity. At 100 megabits,

17:53
the distinctions between television and radio and HD television and all those things, they

17:59
all go away. It all just becomes content on the same pipe or whether it’s your tablet,

18:05
your mobile phone, your television or whatever. So in one generation, all of the distinctions,

18:10
all the differences that we’ve grown up with go away because of the pervasive nature and

18:15
all of this technology. What’s interesting is that 98% of all the world’s mobile providers

18:20
now offer at least one megabit. So I give you statistic after statistic to say that

18:26
this is a phenomena that touches all humans; not just Germans, not just Americans, not

18:32
just Europeans, not just the Asians, and it has a lot of implications. One of the things

18:37
that I’m most interested is what will all these people do when they get online? We’ll

18:41
be—will they behave the same as we do, or will they behave in some different way? I
18:45
don’t know. Now what’s interesting about this phenomena is you have the phone phenomena,

18:50
which I’ve already talked about, and you have the network phenomena, and you have one more;

18:55
you have cloud computing. And cloud computing is the term that’s used for these large server

19:00
farms, of which Google has many, and these servers are used to do interesting things.

19:06
So, typical example; when I was last here in Berlin in September, we actually showed

19:11
for the first time, I believe, in history phone-to-phone translation from English to

19:17
German to English. And we had Khai who’s here in—where he’s over there talking in German

19:25
to his friend who is—in English, and they were trying to buy shoes. And one would speak

19:31
in English into the phone and then the answer would come out in German, and the German would

19:36
speak in German and the answer would come out in English. And it was good enough. Now

19:39
you sit there and you go, "Okay, that’s pretty good. How did they do that?" The language

19:45
is translated into bits, the bits are shipped over the network, the computers translate

19:50
the bits into, essentially, text. The text is translated from one language to another,

19:56
and then from the other language’s text is turned into a voice sensitizer and comes out

20:01
as German all in a hundredth of a second. But most importantly, it will eventually work

20:08
for 100 hundred languages by 100 hundred languages. So it will be possible to literally speak

20:14
to pretty much anybody in the world. You may have to wait for them to finish and not interrupt

20:19
them because the translation takes a—takes a tenth of a second. But the fact of the matter

20:23
is we dreamed of this and now this technology is possible. Another example. You can say—you

20:30
could say it today, you can say it to—in Android, you can say, "How do I get to Museum

20:35
Island?" And it would—it would say right back, you know, in German. It would translate

20:38
it for you and then you could play that to the local policeman who’s busy asking you

20:42
why you’re lost, which happens to me. Or you could say—you could take your—take your

20:49
menu and sort of—sort of point your phone at the menu, right, in German and it will

20:55
translate it into English if you’re me and you don’t speak good enough German to actually

20:57
understand what the menu is all about and discover that you’re ordering a calf’s liver,

20:59
you know, or something exciting. There are a lots and lots and lots of examples, other

21:07
examples. Were digitizing the 2,000 year-old Dead Sea Scrolls so that you could see them

21:13
without having to go visit the Dead Sea. When I go to my laptop, I can visit the Ruins of

21:19
Pompeii. I mean, on and on, and on, and on. I can go—we have historical imagery from

21:25
Berlin from roughly 1945 on. If you take your satellite photo, you can actually dial back

21:30
in time to see the recovery and rebuilding of your beautiful city and see what it was

21:35
like over and over again and on your mobile phone. Pretty interesting. So, this concept

21:42
that I’m talking about is not a new concept. Bill Gates talked about it in 1990. He said

21:47
that, "Information is at your fingertips, all of the information that somebody might

21:51
be interested in including information that they can’t even get to today." Why did it

22:02
take all of us 21 years to get to this point? We’ve been working on it a long time. Well,

22:07
partly, we needed the underlying networks to get faster. We needed the chips to get

22:11
faster. We needed the software architecture to get faster, and we needed the markets to

22:15
develop, and I want to highlight that for a minute. How does Google play into this?

22:22
Speaking on behalf of Google, well, in many ways, a new definition of Google for you is

22:28
that Google uses technology to try to do good things for the world and that we’re trying

22:32
to apply this to make the world a better place and we make money along the way, of course.

22:36
And when I think about it, the most important thing that you have is time. And as you get

22:42
older, you appreciate this even more. Time is everything. And so we focus a lot on getting

22:48
your time back. What we want to do is get you the answer fast, get you to where you

22:52
want to go fast. We don’t want you to spend a lot of time on Google; we want to get you

22:56
to somewhere else and come back, and back, and back to do it. So in Search, for example,

23:02
we want you to get you the questions and answers that you care about right now. Well, what’s

23:08
an example? We did—well, there are plenty of examples. We did this thing called Instant

23:12
Search where we saved a couple of seconds on people search. You know, we showed you

23:16
the answers as you were typing. We rolled that out globally in the last few months.

23:21
All of a sudden, a couple of seconds times a billion people is an awful lot time saved

23:25
so people can do other things and maybe they’ll just do more searches. But we hope—what they

23:30
hope we’ll do is they’ll also find better answers and learn more about the world. Another

23:36
example, we can make search more personal. Now this is with your permission, and I say

23:41
with your permission and I really mean it. If you authorize us, we can search maybe your

23:46
history, maybe where you are, maybe you’ll—with your permission, let our—let you know who

23:52
your friends are. Maybe we can—we’ll search your email as well and show you the sum of

23:56
the answers that you care about in a way that you’ll never be able to do on your own. Pretty

24:01
interesting. Even better. We call this autonomous search. Your phone, by the way, knows where

24:06
you are. So, here I am in Berlin. I like history, all right. I’m walking down the street. Why

24:12
is the phone not working for me? It’s not doing anything else, it’s just sitting there.

24:16
So, why do we instead have the phone go and tell me what the history of each of the buildings

24:23
is as I’m walking by, or the equivalent thing that I care about since it knows a little

24:27
bit about me? There, the search is not just the text but really the place. And if it knows

24:35
what I care about and it knows where I am, it could be generating things that I might

24:38
be interested in. Pretty interesting idea. So, all of a sudden, search becomes autonomous,

24:46
personal and very powerful. I mean, in my case, I happen to like planes and so, it turns

24:50
out that you have, you know, there’s a—there’s literally a museum down the street here that

24:55
has a particularly interesting jet called the Hansa Jet which I was interested in learning

24:59
about and a particular Starfighter that’s on display, right? So, these are the sorts

25:03
of things that I care about. You would care about something else. Search is also moving

25:08
from understanding text to meaning. So, when you say, for example, "What’s the weather

25:13
like?" Do you mean, "Should I wear a raincoat?" Or are you saying, "Should I wear—should

25:22
I—should I water the plants?" So, all of a sudden, you have two choices and we can

25:27
help disambiguate that. Now, in the mobile area, which I highlighted a lot, the scale

25:33
of Mobile is so large that it’s hard to describe how much is going to happen over the next

25:41
year. If I reused setting out on what I was doing, I would focus on mobile first because

25:46
mobile is where all the new applications will be. It’s where all the—all the new and interesting

25:50
applications, solutions and creativity will be applied will be in mobile of one kind or

25:56
another. So, for example, Android, which is our version of the operating system freely

26:00
available to operators, sells or is activated more than 300,000 per day. Again, that number

26:06
is growing very rapidly and we have roughly 27 OEMs, 170 compatible devices today, 169

26:14
carriers and 96 countries. The number of searches from Android searches in our world grew by

26:20
a factor of 10 in the last year. And we give the operating system away and, of course,

26:24
the way we make money is through advertising. And so, trust me, it’s a good business deal

26:29
for us to do this. But from your perspective, having that broad platform enables you to

26:34
build applications that other people would never have thought of; new discoveries, things

26:38
that I would never even think of. We have a browser called Chrome and I’m going to talk

26:44
about this to highlight another development in the web; it’s called HTML5. There are people

26:49
here who have working on HTML5, so you know the technical details as well. For those of

26:55
you that don’t—that don’t, HTML5 is a new standard for the web which will allow you

26:58
to build applications like those that you find on a personal computer but web-based

27:03
but with the same power and the speed and the graphics that you have on the web—that

27:08
you have on PCs. So, all of a sudden, now, you’re going to have these mobile devices

27:12
which are ubiquitous with their location and so forth and you’re going to have finally

27:18
a powerful web architecture, if you will, a web operating system for which you could

27:22
buy—build applications. The sum of the two plus cloud computing is the necessary platform

27:29
to build everything above it, and we at Google and everybody else are also pushing very hard

27:34
on this. And my suspicion is that the next interesting startups, the next interesting

27:39
new companies here in Berlin and Germany and Munich and so forth and the other technical

27:43
centers will all be based on this underlying technology that’s rolling out literally right

27:48
now. What’s interesting—and I don’t talk about this too much unless you’re interested

27:53
in it—is there’s another complete component to what we’re doing which is making money

27:59
for the developers, making plenty for the publishers. And we already talked about the

28:03
Newspass but ultimately, people have to be paid. You have to pay their salaries. You

28:08
have to pay for the data centers. You have to come up with some way of making money.

28:12
And applications developers understand this and indeed Google is one of the companies

28:16
that provides a lot of revenue to support mobile applications through some acquisitions

28:19
that we did. But the core message here is that, for example, YouTube, now 35 hours of

28:27
video uploaded every minute into YouTube; we’ve also now developed advertising tools

28:34
and other tools that will monetize YouTube. So, now, we’re getting professional content

28:38
to come to something which was originally just user-generated and just free. We have

28:44
a similar—similarly good solution with respect to display soft—display ads. Display ads

28:49
are the ads that move a lot. And all of a sudden, you can now advertise with movies,

28:55
you could show little snippets, you could have highly personalized ads. So, where does

28:58
this is all go? For the same reason that search becomes more personal; advertising becomes

29:03
more personal. You’re much more likely to respond to an ad that’s targeted to you, it’s

29:10
about something that you care about, and that you’re ultimately likely to buy. So, if you’re

29:14
a person who lives in the city and you’ll never drive a car because you don’t like cars;

29:17
it makes no sense to show you a car ad. But if you’re in Germany, you’re going to want

29:22
a car ad. You get the idea, right? So, it depends. And we have the capability now of

29:27
targeting. Or if there’s—in the case of baby diapers, it makes no sense to show a baby

29:32
diapers ad in a household that has no baby diapered children. So, the fact of the matter

29:37
is we can target now and the more efficient the ad, the better the return on investment

29:42
of the ad, the more likely the advertiser is to achieve their objective which is ultimately

29:46
to make money. And that money is needed in order to drive the economic engine that we

29:50
all care about. So, the underlying point of all of this—and I’ll—and I’ll finish this

29:58
up by making some observations—is that this is the greatest disruption that we’ve seen

30:04
in perhaps 100 years. It’s on the level of, for example, the invention of electricity.

30:10
That’s how powerful this is. And it’s changing pretty much everything. It’s frustrating for

30:16
many people. There’s a quote from Joseph Schumpeter, "Capitalism inevitably leads to a creative

30:22
gale of destruct—of disruption." And we’ve replaced the economics of scarcity with the

30:31
economics of abundance. So, if you were in a business which relied on scarcity, your

30:35
business model is under attack. It’s a problem. And it’s a real problem and I’m not minimizing

30:40
it any way. And it’s sort of both terrifying and exciting. It’s terrifying because it has

30:50
to do with information and people care a lot about information. I mean, everybody does

30:55
and I learn—I know this more than anybody else because we’re constantly being criticized,

30:56
investigated, commented on, you know, so forth and so on because of the role that we play

31:03
and I do understand that. But it’s exciting because of its scale that somebody here in

31:08
the room in the next six months, 12 months could invent—could invent something that

31:13
would touch 100 million people. This was never possible before. But because of the pervasive

31:19
nature of the Internet and because of the pervasive, if you will, the technology reach

31:24
of the things that we’re talking about, it’s actually possible for you to do this. And

31:28
you see this in the success of new companies that are springing up left and right. So,

31:33
when we have these debates, the debates about privacy, the debates of security, the debates

31:41
of my identity, who has rights things; understand that these are debates that are really about

31:46
how society wants to approach this completely new technology. What norms, what roles, who

31:53
has—who has the power, who has the transparency, who gets to decide? And these are all part

31:58
of how society will organize it and we’ll obviously participate as best as we can. But
32:03
for me, when I look forward, I see a much, much more positive future as a result of all

32:12
of this. When I look over the next sort of near future, I see this coming together in

32:17
many, many ways that will affect all of us. It’s interesting that there’s a quote, again,

32:23
another quote from—this one is from Ray Kurzweil, "Our intuition about the future is very linear

32:28
but information technology grows exponentially." That’s why we’re always surprised. We’re always

32:33
surprised because of the compounding and I’m telling you, I’ve laid out the argument that

32:38
with the growth of mobile, the growth of cloud computing, the growth of these networks, you

32:42
have an exponential explosion of creativity, of change, of disruption, almost all positive

32:48
literally right in front of us. Now, why do I believe this? Well, to some degree, I have

32:53
the optimism of a computer scientist because I believe that information can help solve

32:57
a lot of problems and computer science is really about that. I think computer science

33:01
can help about global warming and terrorism and financial transparency because these are

33:06
information problems. And so, by applying some of these principles, some of these very,

33:11
very real problems in our society, we can actually get them fixed, right, and address

33:14
them in one way or the other. So, imagine a future now of all of this and we’re all

33:21
in this and it’s a pretty near future. I would start with the observation that you’ll never

33:26
forget anything. Not because you won’t forget anything but because your computer will remember

33:31
things for you. Again, with your permission, your computer will remember where you were.

33:35
Of course, it remembers all of your pictures already. And again, with your permission,

33:39
it will tell your friends what you’re up to and remember where they are too. So, I who

33:45
like history and like to travel and so forth, it will remember where I was and where I stayed

33:49
and whether I liked the hotel and so forth and so on. It will serve as my memory because

33:54
my memory is not perfect but the computer memory always is. Computers do what they do

34:00
well; humans do what we do well. Another example is I’m never lost anymore. When I was a boy

34:07
growing up in Europe, I got lost all the time. It was great fun. You know, you’d eventually

34:12
have to ask for directions or get a map. Here, it’s very hard to get lost. You actually have

34:16
to turn off your phone and you’d never turn off your phone especially when you’re lost,

34:20
right? So, you’re stuck. You can never get lost. In fact, you know, we can—we will know

34:26
we—because of GPS technology and others, we’ll know where you are down to the foot

34:30
or the meter or the centimeter, whatever measurement system you care about. The point is your phone

34:36
knows where you are and unless you turn it off, you can’t get lost. Another example.

34:43
People who love the Earth can love it more. All of us understand how important the Earth

34:48
is with the technology of Maps and Google Earth and the modeling that we’re doing and

34:54
so forth, you can now understand the dramatic changes that we are making to our planet,

34:59
some of which are irreversible; some of which are reversible. Using get—satellite technology

35:05
and other dynamic things, Google recently announced something called Google Earth Engine

35:08
which is a program—programmable platform by which you can actually model the changes

35:12
that are being done to the Earth. You can see the direct consequences of the changes

35:17
that we’re bringing on, the good ones and the bad ones, whether it’s climate change

35:21
or water change or food change or what have you. To me, these are fundamental because

35:26
it’s the only planet we’ve got. You can obviously have all the world’s information at your fingertips

35:31
and you could do it in any language because of the dynamic translation that I talked about.

35:36
And so, nowadays, everybody speaks German, everybody speaks English, everybody speaks

35:41
Farsi, everybody speaks the language that they care about. And perhaps more importantly,

35:49
we can help you decide what to pay attention to. I don’t know about you but my problem

35:54
is I’ve got so much coming in, I can’t keep up with it. All right, in between email and

35:59
phone messages and texts and Twitters and all of the status updates on Facebook and

36:05
all of the information that I see in my normal web use, I don’t know how to spend my time

36:09
anymore. I used to, by the way. I used to live in a linear world. Now, I live in a scattered

36:13
world. So, all of a sudden now, computers can help me because Google and other companies

36:19
can help prioritize that using modern computer science technology to figure out what’s the

36:23
most important thing for me to think about right now, okay? And another thing is you’re

36:27
never lonely. There’s always somebody to talk to, and even if you’re traveling and by yourself,

36:32
your friends are literally one text away or a video conference away especially when you’re

36:38
in a different time zone and you’re missing them or you’re missing your family or whatever

36:42
it is. The fact of the matter is this is a pretty big change. Another example, you’re

36:48
never bored, right? Now, the problem is not boredom, but in fact, you have too many things

36:53
to do and computers can help you, again, knowing who you care about, knowing your taste, can

36:59
help suggest things. We have people now on YouTube who say, "Okay, I’ll start here and

37:04
I’ll just keep watching." And they keep watching and watching and watching and we keep selecting

37:08
things that we are pretty sure they like. And somehow, we know that they like it because

37:12
they keep watching it. So, all of a sudden, the application of computers science and this

37:17
huge amount of information allows the computer to make your life even more entertaining and

37:21
so forth. So you’re never bored. You know, we used to waste time watching television.

37:26
Now, you can waste time watching the internet, you know. But the fact of the matter is you’re

37:31
not bored, you’re not lonely, you’re never lost, right? It’s a very, very big change.

37:37
Now, at—here at a university, I should say, that we’re never out of ideas. If I were a

37:43
student today, I would be so overwhelmed by the conversations around me that every single

37:49
thing that we talk about here at Humboldt University is something I’d say, I’d like

37:54
to learn more, I’d like to hear more about this, or I’d like to confirm what the professor

37:58
said because I didn’t really quite believe it, or I didn’t like what my friend said,

38:02
or I’m writing my paper, and so forth. But if you’re an intellectual and you’re a person

38:04
who cares about things, you could care about them deeply and you’ll fill your head so much,

38:09
it’ll be a headache, which I think is wonderful from the standpoint of learning. I’m very,

38:13
very excited and proud of that. Here we are in the car capital of the world; it seems

38:19
to me that cars should probably drive themselves. I mean, after all, a car will drive itself

38:26
better than you will when you’re have too much to drink. It seems obvious. So, we’re

38:31
building, in fact, automatic navigation for cars using satellites and other local technologies.

38:34
So that literally, you just have to press the button and here you are and you go and

38:39
then the only problem we have with our cars is that it drives exactly at the speed limit.

38:45
We’re working on that problem. But you get the idea. If I talk about this—to finish

38:52
up, put this in context. The thing that I’m proudest of this vision of this new world

39:01
is it’s a vision that touches every human being. Historically, information services,

39:08
this kind of thing we’re talking about today, access to knowledge, access to universities;

39:13
historically, that service, if you will, has been only available to an elite, the elite,

39:23
the rich, the power, the educated. But what I’m proudest of all of what we’re doing is

39:30
that a few billion people will be entering the world’s conversation in the next three

39:35
or four years. And for them, they’ll have the same footing or nearly the same footing

39:41
as all of us who are part of the top part of the world, the most privileged, the most

39:46
educated, the elites of the world. The fact that this technology is for everyone is, I

39:53
think, perhaps the most important message of all about technology, that you can reach

39:57
every human because we’re all the same and we all are born with the same potential. And

40:01
I’m proud to say that the internet is one of the great levelers of society and it gives

40:06
opportunity for people who would never have had any opportunity before. But because of

40:11
it, whether it’s a small village or in a strange language or so forth, they can reach their

40:16
full potential. So, thank you so much for letting me talk here. I’m looking forward