This post is a summary of a interview with the President of Google Eric Schmidt, published on April,20, 2013, at http://www.theguardian.com/uk. And was written by Alan Rusbridger as Eric told him. It is like if the Eric himself had written.The title is above.
I would argue that Google and the internet enable people to do more creative work. Creativity will drive innovation, innovation will drive new businesses, new jobs, and so forth. That is how economics work. That is the story of the industrial revolution. The human creativity, this passion for making the world a better place, takes over. I am concerned that we need to fight for our privacy or we will lose it and the reason this is a concern of mine is that it is natural for these technology to aggregate information about citizens. If the Chinese hacked into the NYTimes, how would you feel if you were a Chinese dissident? Google always allow for anonymous search. Anonimity is very important, especially for people who have reasons to believe that the state, or others, are going to hurt them. The internet, in general, has been good about allowing for anonymity. As a matter of historical interest, I wanted to understand what role Wikileaks would play. His core idea is that systematic evil has to be written down, and that , if you have a leaking culture in government, the stuff gets leaked before they can do it. The problem is, who gets to decide who does the leaking?
Five years from now, what will your reader look like? He or she will have an ultra-powerful tablet, the knowledge that is in that tablet about the readers will be so much greater than today. And it will be possible, reading a story, to go instantly deep about the origins, the positioning, the debate. The contribution that the internet made to Arab Springs was the enabling subset of communication that allowed courageous people to unify. That was the step that they had been missing previously and then it was their courage and combat that led to everything else. The optimists would say that the power of the internet and the power of individual empowerment is so strong that it will be impossible for government to resist that connectivity. The pessimists would say that intelligence of government can figure out ways of breaking the openess of internet. North Korea, has its own internet. They have people copying the content that the their leaders thinks is ok and they put it on internal servers. That is the crudest strategy. The chinese government for example, every time a *VPN shows up, they shut it down and people move.
What is the number one education problem in the developing world? Literacy and childhood education. Can we solve that? Absolutely, at 100%. We simply preload smartphones with all that teaching material. They use them to learn how to read. We can also preload their tablets. We have also the textbooks for maths and science, in their languages. In universities you have got new online courses. You have got an smart person who does not have textbooks and is hungry for the latest university education, they are going to get it online. So what do you need for that? You need broadband, if governments are smarts enough to get the 3G and 4G networks. Another way to get information is with SD cards, you know, the tiny little SD cards, because everybody has a phone. Even if you do not have an internet connection, you could have a SD card which would have the information that I am describing. And these SD cards are getting more and more powerful.
*VPN - Virtual Private Network is a method used to add security privacy, privacy is increased with a VPN because the user`s initial IP address is replaced with one from the VPN provider.
