of people that could have a lot of influence in politics. but for various reasons they are not organized that way right now. >> an author in political night at 8:00 on c-span. >> next, google executive chairman eric schmidt talks about the latest innovations. after that, a program on the role of capitalism. after that, a program on state and federal marijuana laws. >> recently "the economist" magazine held their 2013 festival, focusing on economics, technology, and media. at the event, the google executive chairman eric schmidt discussed the importance of mobile devices and technology on

society. his remarks are about 35 minutes. >> an introduction to our conversation on technology, so please welcome eric schmidt, executive chairman of google. [applause] >> thank you. is very good to be here. >> i do want to thank you very much for stepping in on such short notice. >> i was coming anyway. >> coming and speaking in public are two very different things. i want to ask you -- we have a load of questions for you from the floor as well. a want to ask you how technology will change our lives in various different ways in 2013. what we might do is start and then panicked out and go bigger

-- pan out and go bigger. there are a number of google initiatives that might change logs. one is google glass, this idea of wearable computing. is that something we will see more and more next year and beyond that? >> the technology works. if you have not heard of google glass, it is glasses that sit right above your focal plane. it is right above. we have been experimenting with what this can be used for. there are obvious uses for your daily life. if you ever had a device that could or could not accord what you saw contemporaneously, think about it. [laughter] >> how will we use it?

>> we do not know. >> perhaps -- >> hopefully there will be telemetry that will tell you you are about to trip. whenever the digital world can see what the analog world is doing, you see interesting possibilities, whether it is obvious things like people working on fixing eyeglasses, medical applications, to performers to show the audience what they see in addition to what the audience sees. we use these at the new york fashion show, so you could see what the model saw as you looked at them wearing this fashion. >> that was one of the things, the eye-catching imagery trent. the other was the whole idea of driverless cars. >> there is a driver.

the driver is just doing something else. [laughter] i have been in those things. the rx 450. there is a button. it takes on average 20 minutes for the person to stop freaking out. we have been studying this extensively with cameras in the car. [laughter] 4 about 20 minutes, their faces are action. my experience this -- their faces are ashen. my experiences -- i thought i had, but the car did it exactly right. with the car in front of you lurches like this, you can, too, and the a i can see whether there is an escape lane or it means to slam on the brakes, and it can do it faster than you can. >> you moved so slowly in new

york anyway, it would not make much difference. >> in california, 65 miles per hour, you click it up, you are a sports car. we do our race. we have a private racecourse. we have a driverless prius against by human driven prius and the driverless prius wins every time. >> just to get a sense, what numbers are these? >five years time? >> we do not really know, but that is a reasonable estimate. you really do not want to have a mechanical systems what single points of failure. the human in a normal car is the single point of failure. we want a dual set up rate controls, dual ways of controlling the steering. those are in development.

if you know someone who has lost someone in a traffic accident in america, you understand why we are doing this. 30,000 people -- we do not even covered in the news anymore, it is so common. that is a record low death rate. we are doing better. it is 10,000 more people than killed in -- in 9/11 dying every year. we have to do better. >> i was talking about the internet going increasingly mobile. mobile rather than fixed. this is all part of that trend. things and devices on the move. do you see that being something that changes fundamentally the way you use that technology?

>> i think all of us, any of us who live in a model where there are particularly network platforms, standard pc's and so forth that are controlled by an architecture or vendor, like we see in the pc model. what we are seeing is an explosion in the kinds of devices. what we do know is the mobile devices quickly are surpassing any fixed use commit any of the macs and pc's. they are being left in the dust. to give you an example -- android, which is the number one platform in global computing. it has up 5% larger user base than the iphone, always an interesting fact for people. they are turning in millions of these devices every day

globally. the scale of the reach and impact -- we talk about it here, here in new york, you are lucky if york sells system works and new yorkers are pretty sophisticated any web. imagine if the shows up in your village? it is life changing. >> we have a question here from someone, anonymously "what does -- what makes a video go viral?" i was wondering if that was that"gangnam style." >> psy is the record. if you have not heard of this, your children have. last week, he surpassed justin weaver as the most popular phenomenon -- justin bieber as

the most popular phenomenon on the net. >> did you go viral? >> yes, unfortunately. the scope and scale of video online is much smarter than people can appreciate. what is the content of the internet? video. what is the number-one source of video online? netflix. interesting. 10 years ago, any scenario where people will use the internet to watch full length movies, i would say, you got to be kidding. that is a terrible reason. society has proven that i am wrong. indeed, netflix is number one, and youtube is #two. the occupied almost all of the band with the of the internet. -- and with the of the internet.

>> i think i am right in saying you have energy projects. there is an article about the extraordinary reduction in cost of solar power, for example. something similar to moore's law -- >> there's also the china a lot. china overproduces to the point of bankruptcy. [laughter] which is why the panels are so low, but it is closed. >> do you see it transforming technology? >> i do. although it is controversial, we should give credit to those people who have formed these new kinds of oil drilling, generally known as tracking -- fracking. we can have a separate

discussion on how to regulate them and so forth. it is very controversial. it has changed the economic structure of energy production in america. if you look at renewables, what you see now is the automation and instrumentation of the system. it changes everything. this goes under smart building. roughly 40% of the carbon emissions coming out of the u.s. are coming out of buildings. >> interesting. >> and frankly if you would stop heaping the buildings in new york and insulate them better, he would do better. if you think about solar, it is within 1 cent of a kilowatt in current structures, and that is phenomenal. i think there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic.

automation, energy use, instrumentation of your use, etc.. this is a thermostat that you screw into your lot and it is allegedly possible for you to do this on your own. this would be a great christmas present for people who are sensitive about these kinds of things. it learns what you want with temperature. it does that dynamically. >> what is google's activity in the energy area? >> we ultimately decided to fund a lot of projects rather than build ourselves. the level of innovation in energy is equal to the energy in the tech world we would normally celebrate here. >> how does this relate to search? what is the rationale for the variety of projects that you export? >> google wants to be at the

center of the information revolution and in a decade and 20 and 30 years. what we are trying to do is be part of what will happen. we are not always perfect. we do make mistakes. one of the interesting things is in kansas city where we have begun wiring up a number of houses with wireless internet. 1 gigabyte internet. the measured performance is 780 down and 720 up, megabits. think tell your world would change. at that point, there is no difference between your computer and the computer center that its talks to. they are literally in one room together. think about this group and this group and this group. they all go away because you can handle as many dvd's that you want, all the media, all in real time in this format.

if the technology works and the business works, and so far it looks like it could be a very profitable business, it would be profitable for us and others to wire the new world, and that is the new step changed. that would change your average performance on the order of 100 times less than not. >> i want to cut back to -- when you look at the initiatives, do you try also to bring them back to how they can make money for google? >> we have the luxury of not worrying about that as much. we try not to worry about these things. we have the luxury of time because of our core revenue generation being so strong. the way to think about search is to think that it is imperfect because it gives you a lot of choices. we would like to give you the

one answer that is correct. you have to opt in. be more information you tell us about yourself, the more accurate your results can be. the next generation of search will be much more targeted to your. we may get to the point that we can suggest what you should be searching for. "what are you looking for?" your in a strange city and we know your history of. you walk around the streets of new york, and we tell you the history of the st.. it is very easy to generate searches. t-mobile, cloud computing platform -- the mobile, cloud computing platform gives as unprecedented insight into why you are thinking about and what you want to think about. >> that is an example of where you are on mobile.

i want to know x. >> the future is mobile. we call it mobile first. here in new york you have this explosion of high-tech start- ups. every single one starts with a mobile app with an iphone and an android on. literally, that is their first design. >> one prediction that one can make with some confidence in the year ahead is that you will publish a book. it has been announced. you and the google ideas director jared cohen are publishing a book. can you give us a preview of what the book is going to cover? i presume some of the things you up and talking about. >> we sat down the last 18 months, trying to think about where we thought technology was going, but more importantly how

we thought society would adapt to a. we came to the end of the book with a very optimistic view. as a simple way of thinking about it, let's go back to "the economist." what does "the economist" cover? dictators, corruption, technological innovation, general sorts of things. >> you last week. >> yes, iwe were on the cover. let's go through each of those. how do you solve the bad dictator problem? you and power the citizens. unless the -- you empower the citizens. unless the dictator will shut down the internet and shoot everybody -- which they are increasingly ready to do. china, if you look at the train accidents, the discipline, the party chiefs in charge of building of the railways, and

ultimately it was seen as a guise for prison because of corruption. think of the terrible things going on in the world to people at the whim of the police chief or minorities or the terrible thought that women are treated in much of the developing world -- people have cameras. you can report things. you can imagine a network where if a bad thing is occurring, you can reported. if you reported anonymously, you can have anonymous responders. the fact that everyone is connected has a large number of functions and improvements there. think about health care. we were talking earlier in the video about turning 50, and about health care, and people snickered when one gentleman mentioned that. the fda approve the first pillow -- the first bill you can swallow with a digital -- the first pill you can swallow with

the digital chip. will you take this bill -- pill? yes, you will. ultimately it will be in your best interests. we did a seminar on patches, which hurt skin thin services and's you put on your skin, the use the energy of your body to power a wi-fi connection that power is what is going on -- that is monitoring what is going on inside your body. it called your doctor. the doctor calls you back, what a shock. the doctor tells you to get to the hospital. there are so many examples. i bet you, everyone in this room has a mobile device on you come

and if i take it from you, you would think i was taking the most important device that you had. over and over again, we see that if you empower people with information, they act in a lot of ways that make sense. >> one of the examples you gave us was the it less democratic parts of the world where democracy is in short supply and technology can provide a check and balance for accountability. what about mature democracies? we just had an election in this country. did that teach any lessons? were there any technology lessons to be drawn from this year's election? >> it is always hard to reason. the winners get to write history. the losers think about the next election. there is no question the obama campaign had a technology strategy that helped elect the president. there were targeted programs to

get out the vote. to me, the way to say this is governments are going to change, too, because governments spend an awful lot of time delivering service, and now we can measure them. if you ask me to donate money, we can now check to see if that money actually got their. another check and balance on the corruption-major things. we can test the effectiveness of programs. to give you some worries some examples. governments can know where people are and figure out what people report that they are doing versus what they are really doing. there are all sorts of worrisome scenarios that you can imagine. the slippery slope. i will give you one in britain. in london, when you're walking the streets, you were on the camera. those cameras are protected by law. in the last five years, technology has emerged that has allowed the taped section to be

very accurate. you have a front picture view, and there are 13 pictures of you on the internet. we can identify your. -- we can identify your. do you know how many of you have pictures on the internet? the answer is every one of you. because of facebook. you put them there. you can link these systems and the linking has a lot of implications for how this works. >> as you mentioned, google and others were on the cover ups "the economist" this week, which was really the story of the battle of the modern titan's. you mentioned several of them already. yourself, facebook, apple. how to use to the battle playing out in the year ahead? >> in the past, i call this the gang of four. i do not know that this is a good analogy, but it is roughly correct. in our industry, we have never

had network-scalable platforms competing at this scale. we always had 1. ibm and its monopoly. we had ibm and its pc architecture. microsoft went through the trial back in 2000. now we have at least four. and they are each run by hopefully sharp people who understand what they are doing. they are competing, but also cooperating. the reason this is relevant to you all is it is driving prices down at our rate that is phenomenal. when you look at an iphone 5 or android competitors and realize the amount of competition you have, and it is $200, it is extraordinary. and that competition, which is approval by the way, is ultimately beneficial. looked at amazon. amazon is a controversial. 50% of the on-line world and a

larger part of the general e- commerce. extraordinarily well-run, extraordinarily the in its understanding what is convenient. take a look at facebook. if you add billions of users every three minutes, you can make money from the. it is not difficult. you just have to figure out a wet. each of them operate -- you just have to figure out a way. each of them operate differently. take a look at apple and google, for example. think of these as two countries. in the old way, one would dominate the other. is more likely -- it is more likely that each country that has its own religion and incompatible view of the other will have to put up with one another and find ways to work together. with apple and google, we

compete in the mobile world, but we are also search partners. >> there are others who are not members of the gang of four. >> there are many potential candidates. twitter is 1. even netflix, which i mentioned. and of course microsoft is absent in my calculation, although they certainly wish that they were. [laughter] >> we have some very good questions from the floor that relate to some of this. one question is "hall will scrutiny over the use of user data affect business strategies ?" >> what happens with all of these companies that collect a lot of data, each of them has different views -- rules. their behavior will largely be

controlled by the european privacy laws. there's something called the european data protectorate, which is all about what you do with this data. and old simile, the street solution is going to say the data is owned by the person, not the company, or at least not to be used without that person's permission. anonymous data has to be really a non--- anonymoized to be used. it has got to be not made available to anybody else. privacy is something that is up to us and you. you have to decide how much of this information you want to be sharing with other people. and we need to make sure that it remains private. >> another good question from the floor. did the heads of facebook, aol,

and other companies leave google because they did not see a future?" of reallycame ceo's big companies. if you look, each of them will make a good showing. this certainly will. >> i wanted to talk to you about antitrust. that is really going to be one of the big challenges in the year ahead. for all companies potentially, but for google in particular. >> yes come up -- yes, so how do you answer your question? >> how are you planning to answer that challenge? >> the laws differ in europe and the u.s.

the european process is defined by the eu level, and we have been under investigation for almost two years by the commissioner there and his staff. we have given over literally millions of documents. we do not think we violated any european laws, but you know, we are happy to be part of the conversation. we are waiting on what they decide to do. we are negotiating. they announced that publicly. and the united states, the law is similar, but different. in our case, the government decided to have the anti-trade commission to look at this. again, i do not see the consumer harm under section ii, and we'll

ask the government to come back and give us examples of violations of the law. we have not seen that. we are also in negotiations with them. and that is probably all we should say. we are hopeful -- the ideal scenario would be that we come to a mutual agreement with both. >> thinking about that, and you mentioned these other initiatives york involved in. is there -- how do you decide where to focus, what to focus on when you look at planning for 2013? you have such a huge range of things. >> you used the wrong word. you do not "plan." you build a system that innovates. innovation comes from everywhere. if you ask five years ago if we would be involved in it -- we would say well, that is

interesting. at the decisions are largely based by how much there is progress from each initiative. we are lucky that people are constantly suggesting new ideas and new uses of technology, which i think is one of the great things about google it's fun to work in companies where people are constantly suggesting new approaches to the problem. >> here is a very nice question from the floor which sort of combines some of the smaller video things that you are involved in with a bigger picture that you have been talking about. it talks about translation as a very fast industry globally. given that translation is key to spreading democracy and capitalism, what role will machine translation play in giving the middle class, solving middle east problems?

>> when we started this, we had a scientist who invented a new technique which is called statistical machine translation. here is how it works. if you take english and chinese, english and russian, tbhrish and arabic and you sort of put the paragraphs next to each other. one goes one way, one goes the other and the other stuff, you apply these algorithms, it can learn to translate text into any other text. i am not making this up. it is literally magic. mathematically what it's doing, it looks for patterns, a pattern repeats and the translation is done. this translation does not use a dictionary. that's why it is so interesting. sometimes it's brute force. it doesn't have any understanding of what it is translating at all. the beauty of the statistical machine translation which is

what we use is we can go from any language to any language, if a small amount of time, we'll end up with a situation 100 languages into another 100 languages for all of the content if the world. the question is how does this affect things in the middle east? it affects everything because a lot of conflicts in the world an especially wars have been created because of a lack of understanding. one of the comments would be, was that there is a large body of arabic language work that has never been translated into anything. almost none of that is online. all of a sudden if we can put all of that stuff online, sort of the notion of having a little bit of respect for each other is going to go a long way. >> another question coming up related. i'm from africa, what is google's contribution to enabling success to the internet by wi-fi? >> what we did, the african situation as usual is worse than anywhere else. as a society, as a global society, we got to sort of look at ourselves and think how have

we allowed these terrible, terrible things to occur over several decade. what is the story of the internet in africa? it is the most expensive in africa which is the poorest part of the world. how can this be? in many cases, distance, satellites and a monopoly of providers. there is no really good excuse for this. what we have done is we have built proxy caches we put in each of the countries to speed up the internet. we have been funding competitive carriers and in particular competitive fiber to that. the questioner asks with a do we know about internet with wi-fi. you have your phone and the 3 g connection, the connection that enables your phone to work is impossibly expensive. it turns out that more than half of the mobile traffic is not on the cellular providers, 3 g or 4g. it's known as wi-fi, 80211 in the reuters that people use.

it's easy to imagine free wi-fi with common connections where you can use your phone. voiceover i.p. allows you to speak over the phone on the wi- fi network and that competition will open up those markets, i think. >> we have just about come to the end of our team. i want to ask you one last question which inevitably came to mind when you were talking about the magical translation devices. will there be a magical journalism device that will make the communists -- mists redundant? >> what is interesting about technology is that we do a pretty good job of catching up to the basics. we don't do a very good job of genius, all right. if you take a look at google news, many of you use google news, it does a pretty good job news, it does a pretty good job of assembling the obvious stuff.