Google chairman Schmidt '76 talks the future of technology

Eric Schmidt ’76, the executive chairman of Google and a former University trustee, discussed the future of computer science and how recent developments would affect society in a public address to cap the first day of the Princeton Turing Centennial Celebration, a three-day series honoring the 100th anniversary of the birth of Princeton alumnus and “father of computer science,” Alan Turing GS ’38.

Schmidt, who stepped down as the chief executive of the company one year ago, has an estimated wealth of $7 billion. President Shirley Tilghman serves on Google's Board of Trustees.

Schmidt started by speaking about his undergraduate years at Princeton more than 30 years ago and how computer science has progressed since then. He began by quoting Turing: “Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.”

Schmidt split the world into three groups based on their technological capabilities, with less than one billion people owning smart phones and two billion people having “computationally interesting” phones, leaving about five billion people who are not connected at all.

“What’s interesting is that for each person online today, there are two that are not,” Schmidt said. “For the majority of people on the planet, the age of revolution hasn’t arrived yet.”

As he moved on to his projections for the future, Schmidt started with the “elite” group of people who have smart phones, including many of the people in the room.

“For this group, the future offers as a limit only what science can deliver and what is legal,” Schmidt said.

With this seemingly endless limit, Schmidt said that by 2020 a true fiber-optic network with speeds up to one gigabit per second would exist, at least in urban centers.

“We’re already seeing science fiction come out,” Schmidt said, describing the modern existence of automatic translation, voice-to-voice translation and voice recognition. “Audio voice recognition is really, really scary.”

Schmidt also described other technologies that are currently being tested, including driverless cars and virtual realities.

“You think it’s not possible? Of course it’s possible. People are doing it right now. What’s going to be different is it’s going to be commonplace, just like walking around with smart phones is commonplace today,” Schmidt said.

Schmidt continued by describing technologies that can predict traffic jams, economic crises and disease. He also described technology that would help teachers evaluate their effectiveness, claiming that such technologies would become commonplace in five to 10 years.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

“From my perspective, this network that this community is building is more than a set of objects, a set of data; I like to think of it as evolving into a collective intelligence, a global conscience,” Schmidt explained.

Moving on to the majority of the world who are not as connected, Schmidt noted that these technologies realistically would not reach them in the next few years for a variety of reasons including corrupt governments, insufficient infrastructure and poor organization. For these people, Schmidt instead offered the optimistic future of mesh networks, centerless networks that would at least offer people the opportunity to access educational and entertainment devices.

“We think we can get more copies of pictures; that’s not why it’s really important,” Schmidt said, referring to technological developments that concern the technological elite. “What’s really important is to get all the information they need into these devices.”

Schmidt described technological development as building a digital watering hole, bringing technology into places that have never had a textbook, allowing transparency where corruption is rampant and, most of all, bringing connectedness to the world.

“Every single principle of my entire computer science career is people who want to be connected,” he noted. “The great thing about connectedness is we can solve lots of problems."

Schmidt said this connectedness brought about by technology would be a leveler, making the weak strong and giving something to those with nothing.

“Most humbling of all is the sense that we’re just beginning, that you are just beginning, to have something of a boundless capacity for a connected humanity that you will create is extraordinary,” he said.

Schmidt’s lecture was held in a packed McCosh 50, with simulcast broadcastings in other McCosh rooms, on Thursday night.