Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet Inc. (Google’s parent company), is optimistic about the future. We’re entering what I call the age of abundance, he says. And during the age of abundance, we’re going to see a new age — the age of intelligence.
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By 2020, most human beings will have access to the internet. When you have everyone harnessed with this information, the world gets more inter-connected. It gets stronger. There’s more knowledge sharing. There’s more freedom and there’s more openness.
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Schmidt [pictured above] was talking at last week’s Viva Technology conference in Paris where he was a headline speaker. Also present was the newly appointed president of France, Emmanuel Macron, who announced: France is becoming the nation for startups and must succeed in this challenge.
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Schmidt spoke just a few days before he, along with other technology CEOs, met with President Trump, to discuss modernizing the US government’s information technology systems.
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I’ve come to believe that science and critical thinking really do matter. Even more so now in the political world that we have in the United States and in other areas of the world, he said.
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He acknowledged that the fast pace of innovation had made many wary of change. But he emphasized that machine learning and artificial intelligence hold opportunities for a broad range of sectors, including farming, energy, fashion, and healthcare, even if they operated very differently to today.
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The largest taxi company has no taxis, that’s Uber. The largest accommodation company has no real estate, that’s Airbnb. The largest phone company has no infrastructure, that’s Skype. The most valuable retailer has no inventory, that’s Alibaba. The largest movie theatre, has no movie theatres, that’s Netflix.
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These of course are huge disruptions… and incumbents [always] resist change. When Henry Ford released his Model T car, it was dismissed as a fad…