Google's Eric Schmidt predicts the next big things in search and social media
Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has said the next big narrative in the world of online will be the convergence of search, location and social media.
Schmidt, told the Sunday Telegraph, during his visit to the Davos, the World Economic Forum, “Technically, with your permission, we know where you are, we know your history, we can do data extraction and look what it tells us.”
These facts are poised to transform how we see ‘search’ over the next few years he said in the wide ranging interview.
“We still think of search as something we type. Perhaps a decade from now, you will think, well, that was interesting, I used to type but now it just knows.
“How does it know? Well, on mobiles we know where you are, down to the nearest foot. You’ve chosen to log in, with your permission, it knows where you are and it can provide a personalised service.
“So here in Davos, where I come every year, it knows where I am and where I was, and it can say, you forgot that you went to that meeting last year and you hated it because I could tell it or it could observe that I was only there for 15 minutes.”
But to what extent will computers take over in the next few decades? How scared should we be?
“My children are aged 10 and seven. I ask what it will be like for them in 50 years’ time,” he said.
“A child born today with a life expectancy of 90 will live to 2101. Think about it. It is why things like climate change matter. One hundred years is a long time. In 50 years it is reasonable to assume in technology that all of these distinctions between computers and cloud [remote data storage] will have gone away.
“There will be a ubiquitous computational capability that is just so free and so amazing that people will assume that it is an assistant. It knows who you are, it knows what you do, it makes suggestions, it intuits things for you.
“The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory. It is also very good at doing things involving large numbers – such as 'ask a million people a question’.
“It is also very limited with things like intuition – the human things. A reasonable expectation in 50 years is that computers will do things that they do really well, and humans will do what we do really well.
“And the stupid stuff that we have to do, like remembering things, they can do, and the things that we are really good at – like judgment – they don’t really need to do. That division is often lost. People assume that computers will do everything that humans do. Not good.
“People are different from each other and they are all really different from computers.”