Eric Schmidt: preference

Transcript context

…You once said the following, “People are surprised to find out that an awful lot of people think they’re idiots.” Is this still true? If you go on Twitter, many people think you’re an idiot, people get offended. Are we getting better at this? Or worse at this? As a general rule, I try to blame the Internet for everything because everyone else does, and I think some of this is true and some of it’s false. That was a joke by the way. And you can’t joke anymore in the age of Twitter. I’m worried that — let’s see if I can say it right — I’m worried that the sum of the way social media works is organized around some human weaknesses, not human strengths. I’ll give you an example. There’s evidence that, if you’re shown a fake video, and you’re told it’s fake, you can’t eliminate that memory from your brain — it’s a human thing. So if that’s true, then eventually, some startup will figure out a way to exploit that without necessarily the best societal outcomes. So, what I worry about is that the structure that we have now in the Internet allows an individual crazy person to be amplified, and there are many, many examples of this that occurred in 2016. Perhaps we’ll see this again in our election year in 2018. But the important point is, crazy people always existed, but now we can sort them and hear them at a level and an amplification — especially if they serve someone else’s business interests — that’s not good. We’ve known for a long time that disinformation would be a good business for some businesses. So I worry that the sum of people who have special interests, which are governments, foreign governments, special interests of one kind or another, lobbyists, and so forth, will be able to create an environment where people are not able to distinguish between legitimate individual speech and marketing speech, in the sense of stuff that’s being sold to them or peddled to them by some foreign power. It gets much worse with AI because you can imagine AI subtly learning what your preferences are and then learning how to manipulate you. This again is a theoretical scenario. I’ve thought a lot about it, and I’m strongly in favor of free speech for humans. It makes sense, right? But I think we have to deal, as a society, with this question of how much of an amplifier do you want to give to people who are truly insane? Silicon Valley has had a phenomenally successful team-building culture, and you see this in the productivity of the successful companies. Other people allege there is excessive ideological conformity within some of the largest tech companies. Is the success of team building and the ideological conformity two sides of the same coin, and if you have one, you get the other? Or do you think there’s not excessive ideological conformity? Or is ideological conformity a separate problem that can just be peeled off and solve it on its own, without breaking down the team-building culture? Do you see what I’m asking?…

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