14 DAY TRIAL // Eric Schmidt spoke at the Techonomy conference earlier and touched on a number of subjects. He spoke briefly about the Google Wave closure but he also had some insights about the internet in general and the “technology revolution,” as he called it. He believes that the sheer amount of information available to people and the amount of data available about them will fundamentally change our world and that technology is already capable of doing a lot of things that society is not yet ready to accept or handle.
He started off with a daunting number. He says that the information created by humankind since the dawn of the civilization until 2003 weights in at about five exabytes of data. But in 2010, that amount of information is created every two days, he says. And, of course, that pace is only increasing. There have been numerous studies confirming this and, while the absolute numbers may not be entirely accurate, it’s obvious that the world creates a lot more information than ever before.
Schimidt believes that people aren’t yet ready for this, society is not prepared for the deluge of information created by everyone and available to everyone. The increasing amount of data created leads back to one thing, user-generated content, and the basis for much of the web today. From YouTube videos to Facebook photos and tweets, internet users are constantly churning out new content, new data.
But all this data means that computers have a lot more to go on when trying to solve problems. Computers have always been good at going through massive amounts of data and they’re getting better all the time. "If I look at enough of your messaging and your location and use Artificial Intelligence, we can predict where you are going to go," Schmidt said.
"Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don't have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You've got Facebook photos! People will find it's very useful to have devices that remember what you want to do, because you forgot... But society isn't ready for questions that will be raised as result of user-generated content," he said.
It’s not all gloom and doom. He, along with Google as a company, believes that more information available to more people is a good thing. It’s the company’s motto after all. What he’s concerned about are the repercussions of this and how society will deal with them. It’s clear that a balance will be reached, it is always the case, but there may be some rough times ahead.