the reason my old hero eric schmidt is not only to talk that technologists but something we have been talking about a lot, the effect of technology on democracy and world affairs. the best book to be written next year will be written by eric about the effect of technology in arab spring in the democracy movement and in this country. someone who is heading twitter is looking at how it changes our democracy and the world.

i will start with a tail that he told a dinner. he is the head of u.s. aid. he said some was reading the locations of the demonstrations was something she had learned at a class at the american university in cairo called social media under authoritarian regimes. one of eric's employees really did help start the revolution. how much do you think the revolutions of the arab spring were affected by technology? >> i think the revolutionary uses the technology available to them. i went to libya right after gaddafi was killed. they tried to overthrow this evil dictator multiple times.

many had died from it. the dictators in and libya learned that you have to center the media and radio. they failed to center the internet because they were too old. the syrian dictator has learned that lesson and syrian is censoring it today. as much as we would like to take credit for this, we should give the real credit to the people risk their lives. we were simply a tool for them to start something. it is much easier things to twitter, facebook, and youtube to start a revolution. it is not any easier to finish it. the saying is you use twitter to get people out on the streets. you use facebook to organize them and youtube to post the results.

>> i covered eastern europe. they were using faxes and satellite. they had organized. they created a revolution that had leaders so when it succeeded you know he was in charge. does internet revolution lack the capacity to create leaders? >> great leaders are rare. they are rare in the u.s. seriously. somebody who can overcome the many voices and chatter. it is much harder because of social media. the fact is you need someone who can rise above.

in libya, there were 80 militias that came together. today there's something like 10 or 15 that have unified. they have unified using the tools available. there is no obvious a natural leader who has been 30 years fighting the great fight. assuming this goes, how will it played that maybe they will end up with a great one or a series of six months rotating year civil war kind of government. you do not know. >> it is the muslim brotherhood was organizing in the street for 30 years. >> because they are secretive and many of them were jailed and their highly religious, and they are very organized and charismatic. they are the logical place where a charismatic leader would come from.

but they do not actually tell you what you're going to do. they are very careful to not actually say what the trade-offs they are going to make. >> how do you see the revolutions? did you think you were going to be a force? >> not at all. but he was really on his game he would that some people attending social media. during the event in iran, we were planning to do maintenance when twitter was in its infancy.

the state department contacted us about our proposed maintenance. someone called us and asked if we could postpone it. it was an eye opener for everyone in the company. we sort of found out about what was going on in tunisia. we heard in an e-mail from a user in tunisia. he is now the interior minister of youth and sports in tunisia. we found out how they were using twitter to organize protests until everyone where to meet. it kind of washes over you. it is nothing we anticipated or planned for or did anything to promote. it has all been us reacting to how people have used it. >> have you had difficult decisions? i know you said been called by the state department.

what tough decisions have you had to make now that twitter has become such a political tool? >> there have been a bunch. we are blocked in iran and china. you have to make lots of decisions about what you will and will not do in those kinds of places. we remained blocked in iran and china. there are people in china who use it. >> what are you doing to push back? >> we are not going to go there in way we would have to go into the country to provide access to the government censors. we're not going to do that. with the new government, it will be much worse for a time.

it will be worse for the companies that are the there that have twitter-like clones. we were down in pakistan for a couple of days. we were asked to remove a certain number of tweet or the service would not be brought back up. we did not remove them but they brought us back up anyway. in turkey, it is considered a egregious to ridicule [inaudible] -- ridicule ataturk. they will get officials the say you need to take these tweet down and we do not do that. you're trying to figure out what you need to balance in terms of letting people in the country have access and making sure you are not censoring things you do not want.

>> block us to the tough decision you have to make on china and maybe some other places. >> you have a situation where you have citizens the country wants. the government of the country finally does not want it on your terms. it is a power play. in turkey, we were blocked for nine months on youtube. it was because of a single video about ataturk. it may have been that the generals were concerned about some of the other videos that were on youtube. no one would ever tell us that. they have since invoked the basic law allows them to arbitrarily sensor it at any ip level. they have learned. >> do you try to circumvent that? >> the more we circumvent the more likely our employees will end up in jail.

turkish jails are not that good. broadband is not that good. it is a real fine line. our employees face the risk of incarceration and are often called in and threatened. we tried to be careful. china is a long story which i will summarize as we tried and it did not work. >> you pulled out a bit. >> a bit? we felt it was better to engage rather than to be is strange. our theory was that we would create a thing so valuable that the citizens of china that the government be forced to open this up because the censorship will not be ok. we did that for five years. the censorship got worse, not better.

after the chinese government attacked us for months and still a bunch of stuff and we have since publicized that, after they engaged in a very long campaign monitoring the details of human rights activists, we said enough is enough. we like the hong kong system better. removing to hong kong. they did not like that. it turns out there is a fire wall. it is known as the great fire wall. [laughter] it is a censorship box which basically when the information goes through it automatically censors. we solved this by making the chinese government do this. >> what are the kinds of things that are censored? >> interesting. it is illegal for me to tell you. i will give you a summary. the mayor's son is arrested.

the phone call comes from the police which says delete that reference. it is not political thought too much. it is things which are personally embarrassing to the leadership and especially the senior leadership. >> people may not be understanding the magnitude of how how did the government of china will come down on even a simple sarcasm. this woman in china was accessing twitter the at a private network and korea retweeted a sarcastic joke. she was sent to labor camp for a year. >> what about the guy in pakistan who tweeted the comments about muhamed that was immediately delete it, he fled to indonesia, foolishly announced his location and is not unheard of since.

>> there is example after example of what you would think of as the tiniest remark is met with the tiniest remark met with punishment. >> the censorship is getting worse. it is reasonable to believe they are losing. the rate of adoption of the chinese social media, they cannot stop that. even if twitter was blocked, which is a terrible thing, the way they block it is they make it impossible to get there.

they do not care because they are not elected. weibo was the way in which the chinese train incident, the train was shoddy and the government lied. even in a dictatorship, the government has an ego and cares about being in paris. even their twitter and its followers changed the government. it is remarkable. >> do you think the absence of information technology and the free flow that it enables inevitably pushes toward individual empowerment and democracy? >> certainly from individual empowerment. the numbers are staggering. we're going from roughly 200 billion internet connected devices to on the order of 700 billion.

in the next 10 years, all but the bottom billion will have reasonably high-quality smart funds. and a reasonable wireless connection. whether that produces democracy is a western way of thinking. i do not think you can prove it. >> is there a natural connection? individual empowerment and the desire to choose your leaders? >> that is a western view. he could say it produces chaos that has to be appropriate. my point is it does not necessarily follow this. it is not follow that lead to free elections and multiple parties. those come out at much more societal events. the future is going to be much

more bizarre than we think. 20 years ago i thought i understood that was going on. there is nothing new. one day mark invented the web browser. all of a sudden i discovered there were all these voices i have not heard before. we are about to go through the same phenomenon at a global scale. we honestly have not heard from them yet. it is presented to assume they are going to want a particular democracy.

from a book perspective, my conclusion is that the rate at which things are happening is going to accelerate. in america, we think everything is static. this is false. there will be many such platforms that will be an offensive that will be a massive networks scale that will a powerful new forms of social activity. it is literally at a global scale modeling human personal behavior. >> do you see the people using twitter in different countries and cultures, do they use it differently? >> yes. they do. in japan, the japanese use it a lot more as an alternative form of communication at say two text messaging or a phone call as opposed to a way to keep up with the news or follow your interests. it may be the case that some of

that is in reaction to the events of fukushima. in brazil it is almost exclusively indexed to following celebrities as opposed to giving up with the news or your interests. it is absolutely the case around the world use a much differently. >> what did you learn from the olympic tie that you have? >> the olympic tie has been fantastic. one of the fascinating things about the olympics has been it will be really interesting for media to understand this change that we are going through from

the filtered outside-in the view of the event where there is a broadcaster in the interview michael phelps before after the race and get this linear progression delivered to you. now before, during, and after the event you have this on filtered inside-out of view of the event by people who are at the event and even some of the participants. >> i left at the opening ceremonies, every athlete seem to be taking photos and tweeting. it brought a tear to my eye. [laughter] i think that will fundamentally change the way media stars to think about how they delivered events to us.

it will start to get boring it their view is the single filtered outside-in view while there is a multi perspective inside-out of view. >> we feel sorry for the nbc folks that's spent all this money on feature stories and wonderful and their kids about how the athletes and their personal stories and so forth. there is an alternative narrative. watch the olympics via twitter. >> it is just a different choice. >> have you think nbc feels about you trumping them in some ways? >> we have a partnership with nbc that we are working with. i make no claims about how they decide to broadcast what they broadcast.

the partnership has been fantastic. the london organizing committee has cameras at the event tweeting. there is a camera at the bottom of people that is tweeting photos of the divers. you're getting this fascinating perspective. i think that enhances what nbc is doing. they have the broadcast to think about, as it relates to realtime. >> let me switch. >> if you were a chief technology officer, what should america be doing now? what should government be doing

now to make sure we stay competitive? >> i am part of the science adviser for the president. one of the things to know is american technological leadership came with an awful lot of help from the government. it started after world war two. he foresaw building overlying science infrastructure. that is what created everything that dick and i represent. literally in the 40's and 50's the people that laid the groundwork, all of that does not question how it works. the question is what is the right role. it is clear that leadership is

the key part of that. 18 at the top universities are in the u.s. china has zero. there's something about the american educational system college and beyond which produces people who can create things of great value for the world. we need to invest in that. let's start with investing more and in education at every level. that does not mean giving higher raises for union members. it means creating choices fight a measurement system. saying we are going to go back to producing students as good as the koreans and chinese are producing. what about the college in india. it is phenomenal. this is such an obvious political point.

i do not understand why this is a debate. operateour leaderships' on the assumption that the facts are optional. [laughter] the fact is that we have a demographic challenge. we have an automation challenge. jobs are being replaced by machines. the old jobs are not coming back, guys. the new jobs are correlated with high educational achievement in things american is good out. finding the way to maximize that is what we should be doing. [applause] >> you get an acute sense for how important this is.

we were recruiting this young woman who is graduating with a computer science degree from princeton. we interviewed and decided we wanted to hire her. she is choosing between twitter and google and facebook. she ended up going to facebook. i said let me get on the phone. maybe if the ceo calls her -- this is making me look bad. i did that. she called me mr. costolo which was funny. no one at work addresses me that way. i had this conversation that i thought really well and she said i want to thank you for taking the time out. i know you're probably extremely busy. it has been incredible for me to speak the last few days with executives from twitter and facebook and twitter. i had the realization that it

is that hard to find a woman in engineering that is educated that well in america. it is a real problem. >> there are shortages of advanced manufacturing in midwest. what happens is the new machines are sufficiently complicated to operate. any people with college engineering degrees. we are not producing enough of them. because we do not allow foreigners to come and work here because we do not want them to come and pay taxes and create new companies and make lots more money, i'm sorry. i will stop. [laughter] [applause] i would like to get to the stupidest policies of the government. >> here's the thing i do not understand. the technology and digital revolution has totally reformed most industries.

i grew up in journalism. talk about the destruction. the one place that has not been disrupted is the education industry. most people are still carrying textbooks. in almost every place you go there is a teacher standing front of a blackboard. >> the educational system below colleges runs for the benefit of the adults and not the children. [laughter] that is the simplest explanation. there are many possible solutions. we should try them all. which is also measured the outcomes. but we do repeat statistics in high school. we should apply them. [laughter]

>> give me an example of how technology could disrupt this. >> they were central in creating the opportunity. roughly speaking they do a 8-10 minute videos. he's a gifted teacher. everyone watches them. big numbers. they had the brilliant idea is to see what happens if you inferred the classroom and to go to the point where when the student goes, they watched the videos. rather than doing homework. they do the homework and the class and a self-paced way. they have interesting and powerful software. the early results which are being audited indicate a significant improvement in middle and high school class is. once assisted was valid.

in a normal business if someone showed you that, you would immediately adopted. i can assure you it will take is about 30 years to do it in america. there is real proof that new technologies to education can work. the way to understand it is that if you are building knowledge and you get stuck in a classroom, you lose the whole year. if you can come up with technology that can help you learn and aggressively and in an interesting way that is largely self-taught and it is fun and interesting, you are going to excel. we plenty of examples of people that would have been marginalized that ended up at the top of the class. they just had trouble with long division. >> what do you think about twitter in the larger context. >> what we have talked about is

the fact that technology removes the barriers of time and distance between communications. now it is so collapsed with these real time communication platforms and so eliminated the barrier of time and distance that all these other artificial barriers are being removed like the barriers of socioeconomic status, the barriers of status in communication. that will for all sorts of opportunities in government and education. if you fall of all of these discussions, you would get a remarkable education and not how to craft a character and what they think about character and each other's works.

what they prefer this work to this work by this other writer. it is remarkable. it is all free. we think one of the things you would do is gather a list of these remarkable new authors who are bringing this. i think we will try to facilitate the ability for others to curate this collection of conversations. we do not do a very good job. there are so many remarkable conversations that take place on the platform. i will find out about some one in my favor conversations, whenever your family is driving you crazy, pretend you're in a woody allen movie.

the response was tried that, did not work. that was from mia farrow. [laughter] [applause] it is fantastic. she is my hero. i did not know about that until four months after. we need to provide the ability for people to curate. >> what is the next phase for twitter? >> that kind of ability. being able to curate events and broader topics. >> do you worry that social media can be either polarizing to our discourse or alienating in some ways?

>> no. >> what is causing the polarization? >> we have had that for hundreds of years. go back to 1890. all you are seeing is the old behavior using new forms. we're finding out how people are really made. it is wonderful. think about all of these voices. he can hear it with a thousand more like it. >> i do think one of the challenges before us is that there are two sides to that coin of anonymity. it enables a facilitate political speech but it also

fosters hate speech. it's easy to hide behind anonymity and shout whatever obscenities you want at anybody on the platform. i think we sometimes have a tenancy -- tendency to get ourselves credit for fostering political speech and being free speech but we have to keep in mind that there is another side to that. it is not necessarily as helpful. >> i will come back to that. >> is that too much anonymity? >> it is a ranking problem. that is what google does. if you do not want to see step full of hate speech, it should be relatively easy for the systems to figure out what you like and to organize them anyway you see at the age of politically step you want.

anonymity has its negatives. there are places where anonymity is really a problem. there also places where anonymity is really important. take a look at mexico. the local governments is involved. you cannot use a help line because people believe it is bugged. you need to have real anonymity to get people to tell you what they know. they're so afraid of death and retribution. it is a fine line. we will figure out as a society where real anonymity is appropriate and where it is a terrible idea. >> in google + you are finding their way. >> we require real name policy.

a very controversial decision. we felt the seeding of the social network -- we fell in the beating of a social network who is in it? is the behavior appropriate? twitter did a fantastic job of this. we have now liberalized that for the same reasons slim404. it is much easier to liberalize it than to restrict it once it is in place. >> do you think anonymity leads to a coarser dialogue? >> there is lots of evidence that people online say things they would not save face to face. things they should not say. that has been done ever since e- mail. think before you press send. just think. if you have to think that we probably should not press send.

[laughter] that has been known for a long time. now you happen to have a generation who does not that understand there is no delay button. -- no delete button. >> the man who made a comment about muhamed deleted it in 5 seconds. it was long enough to be in a death row in saudia arabia. this is a generation that is being defined by what they tweet in facebook. the stuff is not going away. >> the end of this question. the last two revolutions in which the web was dominated has been the advent of social networks and mobil. -- mobile

those come together. what do you see as the next big thing is that your going to happen in digital realm? >> it will be something that emerges out of the fact that mobile computing is very close to being ubiquitous. it changes the way people interact with their world. what i'm hearing right now, what i am. that will foster some sort of innovation or revolution. >> do you think there will be natural interfaces'? machine intelligence, machine learning? >> we will talk about this earlier. -- we were talking about the turing test earlier.

i do think at some point, probably sooner than we like, there would be some form of passing the test. the turing test is the test of whether, behind a closed partition, you can ask a series of questions and not be able to determine whether it is a human or a machine answering the questions. i am already amazed by things that siri does. it is a hop, skip, and a jump, with the sorts of machine learning some of our great scientists are doing, to think of passing the turing test, probably sooner than anybody would like. >> i like to think of this as a supercomputer, which happens to have this as its user interface. in five years or 10 years, this is a $40 or $50 device best

technology increases and volume increases. when you have that many platforms that people carry around all the time, what will life be like? these are very personal devices. you have them on you. you would never take it from someone. you would never looked at it without their permission. this is a highly personal device already. as the technology gets better, with your permission, these devices can help you decide where you should go, who you should meet, what your choices are, the things going on around you. it is the intersection of mobile, local, and commerce, essentially, on the single platform. it was not really possible until the last few years. it will engender a new generation of google, facebook, twitter, and so forth. the hottest area of investment

in venture is in this area. it is 22 years -- 22-year-olds who have only seen this model. they are backing this up with extraordinary development of machine learning. computers are very good at needle in a haystack. you can imagine eventually a separation of man and machine. what we are really good that is being human. if these things do what we are not good at -- they remember everything. they follow serendipity. the keep you entertained and educated. >> thank you very much. you can see why we are honoring them tonight. those of you who are kind enough to be part of our dinner tonight, let us all proceed to

the door. we will have cocktails and honor our three people. thank you very much. >> we talked with say -- with a "roll call" reporter on washington journal today about the medicare issue. >> i want to turn to stephen dennis -- steven dennis. what was the romney-ryan campaign trying to accomplish with the visit with paul ryan's mom? caller: -- guest: they were trying to help him inoculate against this medicare issue. he started with his arm around his mom, betty, who is 78 and on medicare, and said to the

audience, largely seniors, at this huge retirement community, that he is there to protect her medicare, to protect their medicare, and to protect her grandkids. i think he did a pretty effective job. he was pretty much as good of an event as i think it could have expected. they are going on offense against the obama campaign on medicare, by pointing out the $716 billion in medicare cuts that were used to help pay for obamacare, as both sides now call it, the affordable care act. they think that is going to be an effective attack that will help inoculate them against the

concerns that paul ryan's medicare plan will dramatically alter it, and ultimately caused the republicans some heartburn. host: is this a debate republicans want, heading into their convention next week? or is this something democrats will continue to push? guest: the republicans say they want the debate. i know paul ryan once the debate, knowing him fairly well, covering congress. paul ryan has been urging a debate like this for years and years. if you picked him and did not think you were going to get it, you would be kind of silly. certainly, there are many republicans who are in congress or behind the scenes who are very nervous about it. they would rather be having a debate about the economy, about jobs, about the unemployment

rate. this is a higher risk debate for the republicans to be having. the democrats generally would rather be talking about medicare, and would rather be talking about fighting to save it. host: is this a short-term debate, or will it have top billing with those jobs numbers? we always hear "it's the economy, stupid." is it going to be medicare and the economy now? guest: it will also be taxes. the democrats are attacking republicans on the medicare. the central obama campaign theme now is one of fairness. he is pointing to the tax breaks that george bush and the republicans gave to the wealthy, and repealing those, and saying that paul ryan's cuts to medicare are not to save medicare. they are to pay for even more

tax cuts for the wealthy. that is going to be something you are going to see in campaign ads, and see the democrats hammer on, linking the tax cuts for the wealthy to these medicare cuts. that is something that is going to be a theme in charlotte, for the democratic national convention, and it will be something the democrats keep hammering. host: take us through the appearance by the president yesterday in new hampshire. was this the point of his visit? was it a response to the rhine and appearance? -- ryan appearance? guest: he picked up on reports that under the paul ryan plan, which he published in 2010, mitt romney basically would not have paid much taxes at all. his effective tax rate would have been about 1%.

the original proposal of paul ryan eliminates all taxes on capital gains and dividends. even though mitt romney made over $20 million last year, his total tax bill would have been a couple hundred thousand dollars. the president basically pointed developer and said paul ryan put out a proposal where mitt romney would pay about 1% in taxes, and he wants to cut your medicare. that is something you are also seeing his super pak -- pac start running ads on that theme. it is something they want to keep hammering away at, this idea that the republicans are out there for the wealthy, they are not out there for you, and that the medicare changes are big and scary. there are some ironies here,

because the ryan-romney medicare proposal, which affects people under 55 primarily, and says we will have a system where you can get private insurance, and the private insurance plans will compete, and you will also have the option of traditional medicare -- that is very similar to the health insurance plans for non-seniors that mitt romney put in place in massachusetts and that barack obama put in place with the affordable care of -- care act, which republicans attacked. conversely, barack obama said this was a good thing to do for non-seniors. now he is attacking a similar system for seniors. there are a lot of ironies. host: thanks for joining us this morning. guest: absolutely.

>> tomorrow on "washington journal," the founder of "weekly standard." and a look at the tax system, with an mit professor who argues that america is under text, compared to other industrialized nations. -- is undertaxed, compared to other industrialized nations. and we look at work that focuses on the african american community. in eight days, watch coverage of the republican and democratic conventions, live on c-span. next, "q&a," with washington post columnist walter pincus. after that, secretary of state hillary clinton. then, economic lessons learned from the calvin coolidge