Remarks from a former Google CEO

Some of you are already aware that I took some personal days this past week in order to attend my youngest daughter’s graduation ceremony from Va Tech.  The commencement speaker was Eric Schmidt,  who, for over ten years was the  CEO of Google.  YouTube has made it possible for me to replay those remarks and pass along an abridged version of his address as the subject of this post.  Please keep in mind that I am not copying from a formal printed document, rather I’m transcribing from a speech, therefore the punctuation and phrasing won’t be exactly as it would be had it been prepared for publication.

             …"You're connecting to each other in ways that it was not possible before.  You're using those connections to strengthen invisible ties that hold humanity together.   The connections are what make us human.  They're the things that make  us stronger, ...

If you're awake you're on line, ...you're connected, ...some of you are probably texting right now....Don't take that power for granted.  What you carry with you every day can change the world.  When I was in college, I spent the summers working at Burris Hall in the computer center and the computer center consisted of one computer called an IBM 371-58 and it had a megabit of memory and a  megahertz of processing power, and I was talking to someone the other day and they said "Oh it's a room with a computer,  and I said ‘No, no,  you don't understand, the computer was as big as the room’, ...  and it probably cost around a 10 million dollars.

 Now take a break  from snap chatting and just listen to these numbers, In your phone you probably got 64 or 128 gigabytes of computation for let's say $500 plus or minus,  unsubsidized  That's  20,000 times cheaper and  100,000 times faster, so it's  two trillion times more useful than the computer i used here forty years ago.

Mr. Schmidt pointed out that the commencement address he delivered in 1999 is not on line...

 …because YouTube wasn't invented. And I didn't have a smart phone because they weren't invented, Google was one year old…Amazon was still only a bookstore. Facebook had not been founded.   You couldn't use Twitter, …and, of course, Google Maps  didn't exist, .....So, when you think about it, that's a lot of change, ....[when I was in college] all of our information was what our teachers told us. … now you can know almost everything about everything, .....[just by using]  your smartphone.

If you change the way you approach things,  then you have an opportunity to change the way your life begins.  In other words you chose to live this way… So figure out a way to take advantage of these tools,…  You're the Internet generation, you grew up on line.   You’re the first generation to literally grow up with this as ubiquitous.  It's interesting that I hear lots of people bemoaning this generation, specifically that you all grew up living life [in front of] computer screens always connected to something or someone.  I'm absolutely convinced that these critics are wrong.  The fact that we are now all connected is a blessing.  It's a blessing for safety. It's a blessing for education.  It's a blessing for world peace.  It's a blessing for economic growth.   It's a blessing for your business futures…

 A world's worth of information is perpetually now at your fingertips.  This opens the door to all sorts of interesting questions: How are we going to process all of this data?  … How will you use it?  How will you use it for  good?  How will we find the right balance between letting the data lead us and following our inherent creative and brilliant human intuition….

It is interesting that in the digital age, analysis and interpretation  are even more important than factual knowledge,  ...So here's the deal, …Just because we know so much doesn't mean our problems go away.  The future, doesn't just happen.  …Technology doesn't work on its own.  It's just  a tool.   You're the ones who harness its power.  You're the ones who lead it.  It's in our service and in particular in your service.   It's up to you to know your environment and to use these new tools at your disposal in the smartest and most effective ways possible... A computer is obviously capable of identifying insights…but, the truth is there's plenty we can do and we need to do for ourselves. Intuition, compassion and creativity, these are the things that make us special, ...These are the things we do much better than machines and that define us as humans....

So we're on a cusp of a new and much larger scale of innovation. ...  [Progress will be made in areas such as climate change, fighting cancer, etc…]   But, someone has to make it happen and those people are you.  Computers won't just do this.  It's not going to happen on an auto pilot and it's not going to happen because computers think it's going to happen.  You need to drive it.   You need to make it happen.  ...All  of us are counting on you.   The future that you're building is mine too, ...I need you to do some things; ...I need you to be curious...Ask a lot of questions and go out and try to find the answers.  Don't accept traditional or conventional wisdom.  …When someone says you're thinking too big, say, ‘I don't think I'm thinking big enough.’ 

I thought all of this is a good reminder that technology is a tool which we have to use if we are to connect with today’s digital generation.  Also, teaching this generation higher order thinking skills is far more important than the impartation of facts, after all, students can find all the facts in the world merely by taking their phones out of their pockets.  We need to help them develop the skills for using these facts.