Smart phones hooked up to mesh networks are the devices that will open up tech in this part of society. Although Schmidt is sensible and acknowledges that, “No one is suggesting technology is going to suddenly transform the social, political and economic conditions of these communities, even in modest amounts can change lives.”
What keeps Eric Schmidt awake at night?
So, the future looks pretty bright in areas where access to the web remains stable. Providing that access is not blocked or filtered.
On which note we come to the things that Schmidt find worrying about the future of the Internet. There’s three on the list, but they’re big ones and worth pondering.
1: We built the Internet without criminals in mind. It didn’t occur to us they’d be on the internet too. While getting more and more secure, the vulnerabilities in its design will exist for at least the next decade. While threats come from individuals and groups of people, the biggest problem will come from nations that seek to do harm. It’s very difficult to identify the source of cyber criminality and stop it.2: The fact that there is no delete button on the internet. Much of the existing privacy debate centres on the tension between the public right to know and individual privacy. I hope that ranking emerges that can distinguish between truth and falsehood.
3: I worry about governments filtering information. The government tried to turn the internet off in Egypt. Many governments are trying to build their own walled Internet, where we can’t tell what’s been witheld from us. Not only does filtering not work, it can create dark places where hate, radicalism and crime can flourish.
Filtering technology will become more effective. We face the real possibility that we could end up living in a society where software silently deletes our voices, our thoughts and our culture. Make no mistake, this is a fight for the future of the web and there is no room, in my view, for complacency.
Those are some huge problems and it is likely to take decades of work to put any of that right. At least for now there is some clarity about future and past of the internet and probably where to start if you’d like a job at Google.
Support your local comp-sci teacher
Through the rest of the talk, Eric Schmidt went on to outline the idea that there should be more support for education in computer science.
There appears to be a disparity between the actions of youth and its education. “Today’s generation is the first fully connected generation that the world has ever known”, says Schmidt. “If they’re awake, they’re online. That’s your children.”
So if they’re always connected, why is education not supporting their learning around the objects they seem to be perpetually attached to?
Schmidt says, “The root of this problem lies at the sorry state of computer science education in schools. I’m told that computing represented a half of one per cent of a level results in 2011 in the UK. that’s about 4000 students.” So that’s a F grade from Google on the UK’s education papers…
“Rebooting computer science education is not straight forward”, he continues. “What I mean is teaching computing as a science, the basic architecture of a computer, the concept of an algorithm, the logial reasoning that goes into writing a program. This matters, not only because it gives a glimpse under the hood of a tool that is intrinsic in everyday life, its useful because of the thinking involved.”
As a result of reading the research around computer science and teaching in the UK, Google is teaming up with a charity called Teach First,. The aim is to put exceptinal graduates in the most challenging schools.
Google has provided the funds for Teach First to train more than 100 science teachers with the majority focused on computer science. They’ll get a bursary for equipment too. It might not be the ultimate solution, there are many ways in which computer science students and teachers can be encouraged and supported, but this is a start.
Schmidt ended his talk with a rallying cry, “We’ll do what we can, but ultimately this is a problem for everyone. If children are not inspired to learn about science, it’s a lost opportunity for them, and a loss for the world.
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