In a previous post I cited President Barack Obama’s appointment of Chief Technology Officer of the United States, Aneesh Chopra to “promote technological innovation to help achieve our most urgent priorities…”
Seems like the job has gone to Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.
Eric Schmidt spoke at the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh for the Pittsburgh Technology Council. There he presented a futuristic view of the possibilities for the advancement in government, business, the economy and in individuals, all with an optimistic flair and a keen eye on the data drivers.
Schmidt’s presented images of cloud computing supported, real-time data exchanges that will inform our daily walks via our smart phones while also driving our domestic policy research initiatives: all based on relevance.
See choice excerpts from his talk below.
Watch his video presentation on technology, innovation, and the global economy.
Eric Schmidt, CEO Google “Pittsburgh Technology Council”
Here are some key excerpts:
Growth occurs because of private sector investment and innovation building new products and services that people care about. 2:26m
Real growth, sustainable growth comes from the investment of businesses and services that we all take advantage of. 2:42m
Pittsburgh is a great story. 3:30m
Eric Schmidt coins “Gutenberg’s Law”:
History has demonstrated that there is a direct correlation in an amount of info available to the average citizen and economic growth and the progress of that citizen’s country. 4:35m
The more information that’s available the more that smart people can act on it. 4:56m
I’m one of those people who believes that there are smart people everywhere. 5:04m
And so in the global competitive model… is that you have an openness about information and that you use the information tools. 5:09m
The cycles of society have accelerated. The ups an downs- all because of the transparency and connectedness of all of us. 5:55m
We now respond to things in a global context that we would have never even known about event 10 and 20 years ago… 6:08m
On the correlation between information and economies:
World Bank Study: 10% of increase in high speed access, economic growth was 1.3% points…
So this stuff works. And it works because of globalization, globalization of information, globalization of markets. 6:50m
Japan leads in the speed of broadband. 7:21m
The avg Japanese city dweller has a 160Mb connection… Which is inconceivable to us here. 7:23m
The New US standard is capable of generating 50Mb per second connection. That manages to bring us to 13th in the world in terms of broadband penetration. 7:31m
The data that’s being generated is overwhelming. 487 exabytes of data information was created in 2008. That’s double of 2007. 7:58m
Today we are generating about a zettabyte of bytes. 8:15m
We estimated that the data generated by all of humanity from the inception of humanity to 2003 was about 5 exabytes. 8:25m
We have generated the entire world’s humanity of information… in the last 2 days. This is an explosion. And its an explosion with far reaching implication for all of us. 8:35m
There were 77 million smart phones sold last year. 9:13m
10 years from now… it will be possible to have all of music ever recorded on your ipod. 9:30m
The average teenager is now going to send 10,000 text messages a year. 10:00m
Historically you knew a hundred or 200 people in your tribe, and now feel like you’re a global citizen. 10:25m
All of these people are spending all of their time contributing stuff to each other. 12:08m
So the information you get is now more likely to be from your friend, or person to person, user to user. 12:13m
We’ve finally have now seen the breakdown of the traditional hierarchy of single individual to broadcast. 12:21m
The majority of information you that get everyday the way that you hear and the heuristics and the judgments that you make are from what your friends generate and from what your peers recommend, and that a permanent and important change in how our society works. 12:27m
“Remember what I read yesterday, remember what I know. Don’t tell me something I already know, tell me something I don’t know…” those technologies are already available today. 13:14
On cell phones:
You walk down a street it can tell you everything that happen on the street if you love the history of where you are. It can suggest where you will l go. It can predict where you will be 13:42m
So now you got the same ability to connect to things real time. 14:34m
All of a sudden this notion of real time tracking become useful for all of the things we take for granted. 15:29m
Because we can do real time data now, of the economy, of what people are doing, of what people are thinking, and what people are reading, we really can know the questions that we have to estimate from our friends – and we can do it scientifically. 16:11m
Had we done the same thing [network all the computers] we would have know that this horrendous [financial economic] crisis – we would have seen it coming. 17:03m
Had we been transparent and open we would have could have avoided the horrendous pains that the globe has gone through. 17:26m
Google Chief Economist, calls this time a Period of combinatorial innovation: its the system of innovation and its innovation all working together going as fast as they probably can. 17:51m
This is analogous to what happens standardizing the mechanical parts in the 19th century. We are doing the same thing with standardized of internet components. And that standardization has now made it all possible. 18:34m
When you want to see innovation, you will see it in these creative communities, little companies that have banded together. Small groups of people that have a mission and they try something and they try something. 18:59m
If you want to look for the face of innovation… look instead for this messy creative unstructured interesting, full of creative people kind of a model. Cause that’s will innovation really occurs. And that where the innovative people ultimately will go. 19:29m
So what happens is that this creates the opportunity to do businesses called micro multinationals: these are 10 people who see themselves serving a global audience. 19:56m
These are the business that are going to create the jobs that will get us where we need to go. 20:19m
What happens is as we lower the entry price, there are also ad models where a lot of money is going to these small company which allows them to get to the next stage and see how far they really can get. 20:22m
Cloud Computing: the opportunity we all have is to let people manages these data centers and you can do what you do best. 21:24m
What is interesting to this phenomena, is that size isn’t such a big barrier to entry as before. 21:49m
WSJ: There are more than 452,000 people say that blogging is their primary source of revenue. That’s even more than the number of lawyers we have in our country. 21:58m
This is a permanent shift in the economics of our world around us. 22:25m
Mobile phones everywhere, data everywhere: what does the world look like? Humans will do what humans know best, which is to be human. 23:11m
What will computers be good at? They’ll be at remembering everything, to recognize everyone, to know where everyone is, predict short term future, and continue to beat us in chess. 23:00m
What happens when all of this get put together, is that the world becomes more ambiguous, the world becomes more shades of gray. 23:59
The kinds of leaders and leaders we have are the ones who flourish in ambiguity. 24:30m
And because of this, it gets harder because of sophisticative techniques to know exactly what the”truth” is. 24:45m
But legitimate Truth groups, ones are actually have to get a message out, will have to battle with well funded targeted literally people trying to deceive because it will be in their economic interest to do. 25:03m
There will be possible to do clever forgeries…. All of us will have to learn how to deal with that and how to detect it , and hopefully how not to be influenced by them. 25:35
And in a world with of essentially perfect copies, people will be quite happy with a copy of an original because the digital copies will be so good. This has a lot of implication for how the content and media world work. 25:46m
In this new world there will be more bubbles. The bubbles will be higher, faster and up and down. Cause its true of all markets. We’ll all have to get used to that. 26:15m
The only answer… is about transparency. In this situation that I’m been talking about: open government, open activities, open standards, open networks- is really the only way.26:48m
Information hiding is ultimately a bad thing in these sort of open networks. 27:11m
Another thing that people should do is they should stop consuming energy and start consuming data. 27:40m
All of the issues we face with climate change can be addressed in many many ways by much smarter use of information to control and use our energy. 27:49m
And climate change is clearly between deadly nuclear power is really two of the great threats to the world moving forward. 28:00m
We are going to use computers and use information to be more careful with how we use the most precious resource we have all around us. 28:45
Everybody is going to be a critic in these new models. 28:35m
Another thing that we can do is take advantage of the fact that the network is more powerful then your computer. 29:50m And this is going to happen now with so many people having mobile phones in many powerful new ways. 30:00m
Let’s make sure that the principle that’s established in this dialogue is that extremist don’t win. 30:40m
Let’s make sure that we use the collective wisdom of us to understand of what good and whats valid and lets have both the decency and the proper approach to try get to the bottom to what the real truth is on any particular issue is. 30:51m
Growth is going to come from… the investment and the decisions that are being made in cities like here and by groups like this. 33:19m
One of the strategies is “optimism.” Literally when people feel better they invest and they get better. 33:41
Eric Schmidt quotes De Tocqueville (1831):
America is unique because of its abundance of land, its absence of a king, and its democratic and egalitarian institutions and values. 34:15
From my perspective this story I’m telling reflects the possibility of newness, new places new people to be heard, new institutions that must earn and re-earn their relevance. That’s the challenges that we face: every govt, every CEO, every citizen. 34:40
I personally believe in the genius of the American People. 34:57m
When I look at my own story… what I see is creativity and the power of technology, and the genius of people working hard in small groups doing clever things. 35:03m
Where is the growth going to come from? And its going to come from exactly here and exactly in this right way, and I’m excited to be a part of that. 35:27m
Grand Vision?
What technologies or societal advances (transparency, etc) do you think will be central to facilitating our economic recovery and future prosperity?
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