Introduced by MIT’s Thomas Malone, one of the leading researchers in the field of Collective Intelligence, Schmidt explores a wide range of topics. By the time the presentation really gets going around 11 minutes in, he declares the global network of knowledge to be “as important, if not more important, as the development of electricity.” He also gives the audience a new motto: “in God we trust, but all others bring data”. Of course Schmidt brings Google into the conversation, pointing out how the search engine giant researches 200,000 experiments in their field each year, incorporates 500 new developments, and faces an ever changing web – 16% of searches each day are new. Google’s also becoming more open, revealing some of their recent changes in approach last fall. On a more personal note, Schmidt’s data-centric approach to global problem solving shapes not only his take on politics (leaders should follow facts, not opinions), but also his take on the future of humanity. Around 22:00 he delves into the merger of the physical and virtual worlds. Yet for all the change Schmidt foresees, and he predicts quite a bit, he clearly views the global sharing of information as a powerful tool for freedom against oppression: “the last gasp of an autocrat is to turn off the internet.”
Questions, starting around 33:30, discuss digital rights managements, renewable energy, global warming data, exponential growth in intelligence (41:20), pending government regulation, how to maintain physical intuition in a virtual reality dominated Earth, and the ways in which we can use data to motivate behavior.
MIT Tech TV
[image credit: Guillaume Paumier / Wikimedia Commons, CC-by-3.0]
[screen capture and video credit: MIT TechTV]