Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)‘s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt spoke about various things at the DealBook conference in New York yesterday, which was attended by Insider Monkey. He spoke about what Silicon Valley companies want from future President Donald Trump. He also spoke on various other issuess, including Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Peter Thiel, Artificial Intelligence, and Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA)’s CEO Elon Musk during his speech. Let’s take a look at what Mr. Schmidt had to say.
When asked about new President Donald Trump taking anti-trust action against Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), forcing Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) to manufacture in U.S. and Silicon Valley’s arrogance.
“The first part of that, the one about Silicon Valley’s arrogance and exuberance is undoubtedly true. The second part, we don’t really know. We will just have to wait and see (what Trump does). A new government is going to be formed; It would be an all Republican team so think of it as all Rs. They have a traditional set of doctrinal issues which are being challenged by the new President, and I don’t think we know…”
When asked about backlash on Peter Thiel, Mr. Schmidt said “I am a Peter Thiel’s fan, I think that he is a brilliant entrepreneur, I like him personally, and I like a lot of things which he says, my personal view. And I think that we want to have a culture where people can speak what they think. I admire what he did.”
Andrew Ross Sorkin’s next question was about artificial intelligence and machine learning: “In the context of the support which Donald Trump received One of the things that I was reading in the past 48 hours was that there is a large community in this country that feels under served, worries about their jobs, worries about they are unemployed or going to be unemployed?”
Here is how Mr. Schmidt responded:
“But is that a new fact or has always been true ! However, if you take the current economic situation into account, we just finished 7th or so year after a horrific recession 2008. The unemployment levels is as low as they have been many many years; wages have risen for middle class, upper middle class and rich people for some years. In the last year, even the lowest paid service providers saw labor competition last year and wage increases. So we may feel badly about this but you take the current economic situation in terms of employments, jobs over pretty much all of the previous scenarios by any means. My conclusion is you have immense amount of information coming to people but they don’t feel that they have the tools to address them either governmentally, or personally, or within their corporation. And you also have pervasive insecurity which seems to pervade everybody. It’s their perception of their uncertain future which they perceive through media and changes which happen around them. However, the math is that American economy is doing well and American employment situation is doing well and if you are confused by that, visit Europe.”
Andrew Ross Sorkin then asked about the differences between what Google and its competitors Facebook Inc and International Business Machines Corp were doing about artificial intelligence and machine learning.
