 Good afternoon. It's a very exciting session. For me, I consider myself as an entrepreneur, even if I'm a social entrepreneur working for the public good. But to have on my side someone who is considered as one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our times, Sergei Brin, who is, as you know, the co-founder and president of Alphabet, I think it's a unique opportunity to exchange some views with you. And I wonder whether I should take my tie-off or not. But let me go immediately into the subject. We talk a lot about the Four Siddhas revolution and I have written a book one year ago. When I look at the contents, I have the feeling such a lot is already outdated. But was considered a year ago science fiction is already reality. So maybe my first question to you is, where do you see the edges and the next frontiers of the Four Siddhas revolution? That's a fantastic question. First of all, let me just tell all of you that you maybe should doubt my answers a little bit. So when I was heading up Google X a few years back and one little project we had in there, which is now called Google Brain, which was this AI effort, but I didn't pay attention to it at all to be perfectly honest. And myself having been trained as a computer scientist in the 90s, everybody knew AI didn't work. It's not like people tried it, they tried neural nets, none of them worked out. And this fellow who was one of our top computer scientists, Jeff Dean, would periodically come up with me and look, the computer made a picture of a cat. And I'd say, okay, that's very nice, Jeff, go do your thing, whatever. And fast forward a few years, and now Brain probably touches every single one of our main projects, ranging from search to photos to ads to everything we do. And yeah, this kind of revolution in deep nets has been very profound and definitely surprised me, even though I was like right in there sitting like I could throw paperclips at him. It's an incredible time. And it's very hard to forecast what can these things do. We don't really know the limits. And in 100 years, if we imagine ourselves that these can do kind of everything we can imagine and more, it's a hard thing to think through and has really incredible possibilities. But I think it's impossible to forecast accurately. But Sergei, would you see more the positive side? Of course, as an entrepreneur, you have to see the positive side. But do you see also possible risks in all those fancy, if I may use this word, a new means which we will have at our disposal? I think it definitely requires some thought. And incredibly, and I'm here at Davos, and I'm just shocked at how I feel like the Luddite in the room, everybody's talking about, well, how do we cope with this increased automation here and the jobs displaced and so forth? And I feel like the one like, oh, actually that's pretty hard to do with a computer and I kind of know what we're trying to accomplish to make that technology work. And I think a lot of folks here are, I think, correctly forward thinking taking some of those innovations for granted and then saying, well, what does that mean for society and so forth? I think that's the right thing to do. I think thinking through sort of AI as the continuing of the automation that we've seen in the past 200 years and how that evolves society and economy and social order, that's the smart thing to do. I don't think it's impossible somehow, but it deserves a lot of thought. You cannot, let's say, stop it. You can channel it. But I want to follow up a little bit about the horizons. We speak about our times now being, let's say, shaped by the digital revolution. Some people would say, when we sit here again, you came over 10 years ago as one of our young global leaders for the first time here, when we sit again together in 10 years, we may much more talk about the biological revolution. And of course, there's a combination of the biological and the digital revolution. Can you explain your thinking? Can you explain your thinking in this respect, particularly because I know you are very interested in the medical issues also? Yeah. Well, I think you can approach health from several levels and say, well, what are the specific things that we are afflicted with, whether it's heart health or cancer or Parkinson's, I'm personally passionate about. And look at the specifics of treatments and understanding of those diseases. You can look at the more, this is a dilemma I have as I kind of invest in Parkinson's research. Should I be doing that? Or should I be investing in more fundamental research? You've seen what CRISPR, for example, has allowed biologists across all disease categories to use that kind of a tool. And it's just a more general kind of biochemistry innovation. And genomics has obviously brought us a lot of innovation there broadly. But then you could also ask the next question now, leading to what you said about the digital revolution. Well, if we had smarter processing, smarter software, could it unveil patterns and understanding should we just be working on the machine learning solutions that are broadly going to allow us to do more in biology, but also in other fields in the economy and electronics and astronomy? So it's a whole set of layers. And these lower level layers, the increased machine learning and so forth kind of spans the gamut of human endeavors. And therefore, when you invest in those things, you get this multiplied effect. But of course, you still need to do the biology. And then you need to understand the individual diseases. And ultimately, you need to treat individual people. So big data, digital tools at the service of medical and biological progress and advancing very fast. But can you imagine that in 10 years when we are sitting here, we have an implant in our brains? And I can immediately feel because you all will have implants, I can remeasure your brainwaves. And I can immediately tell you how the people react or I can feel how the people react to your answers. Is it imaginable? I think that is imaginable. I think you can imagine that. You can imagine, well, you're going to be sort of transplanted into the internet. So to speak to live forever in a digital realm. You can imagine that you just in your biological incarnation are going to live to be some very long age. I think it is almost impossible to predict. And in fact, the evolution of technology might be inherently chaotic. It could have been the case a couple of hundred years back if it so happened that electricity evolved a little bit faster compared to internal combustion, that we all would have been driving electric cars today and then somebody would have a new fangled internal combustion thing that would be like, whoa, that's kind of weird. But history happened to go one way. Maybe there are fundamental inherent reasons for that. But I think when you ask these kinds of questions about the future, what does it mean to be human in the future? What does it mean to be an individual versus society? Where are we going in the long term? These are deep and powerful and fundamental philosophical questions. But I don't know that we are equipped to answer them. I think it's premature because we don't know yet how the technology will look like. But one fear which I have heard is that technology now is and digital technologies mainly have an analytical power. Now we go into a predictive power and we have seen the first examples and your company very much involved into it. But since the next step could be to go into prescriptive mode, which means you do not even have to have elections anymore because you can already predict what, predict and afterwards you can say why do we need elections because we know what the result will be. Can you imagine such a world? Well, you might then further ask why do we need to have elected leaders at all because you might as well have all the decisions made. I think that's once again, I mean you're venturing into I think profound questions. You can ask also what will we actually want? I mean we have a set of values and desires today that are probably pretty different than before the industrial revolution and different still than before the agrarian revolution. And we might continue to evolve and many of us today participate, obviously all of us probably in the global economy developing and so forth. Some of us choose to be Buddhist monks and we just seek enlightenment through our spirituality. So I mean I think people have different ways of evolving and finding meaning in different situations and it could be that the way we look at it a hundred years from now is so different than we look at it today that it's almost unrecognizable for us the thinking, the rationale and the desires. We wouldn't even be able to translate. I think this is a very not only interesting, it's a crucial issue. We are looking at technology very often threatening our present thinking interpretation of how the world evolves and actually we probably need new, you use the word meaning, we need new concepts to define what humanity is and what's the purpose of our lives is and we may go much more again into the direction of people are afraid of robotization but it may be humanization which robotization will allow. Would you, this is a very optimistic perception which personally I share, but would you agree? Oh, a hundred percent. I mean I think if you were to go back in time, 10,000 years and you meet somebody out there you know working their field you would say and they said well you know they probably wouldn't even ask you what do you do that wouldn't be a meaningful question but if you would say well I'm an economist they'll be like I plow my field and then you know we could talk more about you know whatever it is that you mean you do. You know I think it is exactly true. I think that if some of the burdens of day-to-day life that have been increasingly alleviated through technology through agriculture and so forth you know maybe that leaves us free to really think a little bit more deeply about who does we are and what it is we see. But so it's new technology paradigms need also I would say a new government governance paradigm if I think of the old-fashioned let's say governments see a technological development or regulatory agencies so it's a parliamentary commission finally regulations come out after five years this is absolutely not suited anymore to our new technologies so we need we need much more agile interaction between business regulators civil society and so on. Yeah I mean and once again you know I've been really blown away this year as you know I haven't been to the forum for about eight years and I think of the level of you know enlightenment and conversation between you know politicians and business leaders and social entrepreneurs is incredible to me and that's the kind of interaction I think that'll breed success and I think also don't forget in you know outside of here you know oftentimes it's a very antagonistic relationship between government and business and so forth and I think that also is very unhealthy so I think not only you know should we try to tackle things more quickly but also in a real collaborative way. I think some of this let's say antagonistic view comes because people see particularly the effect on job elimination and of course you know Schumpeter's rule of creative destruction or destructive creation and people have difficulties to see the jobs of the future. I explain you will have maybe we are in need of I don't know robot polishes or drone dispatchers but I think there are limited possibilities for such skills. Where do you see the skills which you I mean I think you in alphabet you do not have enough people I mean you are permanently looking for people but where are those jobs coming from and what skills do you particularly emphasize. I think look that is a fantastic question and I think you know in the sessions I've attended you know everybody's asking that question. I guess I would hope that as some of them you know maybe more mundane tasks are alleviated through technology that people find more and more creative and meaningful ways to spend their time. I think you know the way you're sort of the word job specifically you know has a lot of implication and a lot of you know the way that we might have spent the past couple generations like the job means you go to the office like here and you do some things you have papers you have an inbox you have an outbox and I think so our mindset is somewhat narrow in that way and yet we have you know jobs that are more creative and thoughtful you know take economists for example which is you know a hard thing to describe to a farmer. Fortunately I'm an engineer. Yeah oh you're an engineer sorry. Okay we have some economists here it is the world economic form. Not engineering for real. Engineering is pretty easy to describe I think to folks but being an economist is not like that easy to describe and it's not that we need five billion economists but the point is that I think if you sort of continue that trajectory you do see more and more people that have been freed up over the past couple hundred years to do work that is you know more kind of thinking about things or creating things you know seeking aesthetics whether it is in an intellectual domain or a purely artistic domain and I would hope to see that trend continue and I would hope that the world would find you know an opportunity this is where I think education becomes very important and I think broad education but as you know some of these jobs are displaced giving people the opportunity to get educated from the point of view of having actually the education resources the financial wherewithal to be able to pursue that like you know you don't want to be you know studying Shakespeare and going hungry or something like that and and being somewhat open-minded giving people a chance to develop different skills that aren't necessarily you know okay we have 5,000 needs for this exact kind of thing today because probably the thing that you want exactly 5,000 of today is the thing that also is more realistically automatable so I think it's important for people to be able to have freedom to study financial opportunity to study and and to get meaning I think in addition to you know work being an important way that you know we exchange money and whatnot people find profound meaning in their day-to-day jobs and I think that's another important thing for us to preserve. I would say this is the key let's say a message for me or the hope that we can move from jobs which are meaningless much more to meaningful tasks and say maybe in the social area in the cultural area and that will be the underlying concept for a more humanized society but I also agree with you we need we shouldn't look at individual jobs now where do we need 5,000 jobs more and so on the key is the reformation of the whole educational system which is completely outdated would you agree? I think there are several systems that we have in place that I think for a lot of understandable reasons you know they had just have so much inertia they lagged behind education is one and healthcare honestly is another and I don't mean healthcare in the sense of finding the biological routes of disease I mean you know sort of healthcare systems of hospitals and you know maybe insurance be it national or employer or whatnot and you know these systems are just so deeply embedded from an infrastructure point of view from a sort of governance point of view and so forth they're very hard to transform and to update to today's needs but I think that is a challenge that we should seek to overcome and within education I mean I just think everyone should have access to education and I'm talking about obviously sort of primary education and secondary and university and you know for that matter postgraduate work I mean those things don't really those things are extraordinarily expensive today for kind of artifacts of the infrastructure we assume we need like big buildings and you know fancy classrooms and things like that and I don't think those things are necessary I mean it's fine to have those for some folks but education should be universally accessible yeah when I look at I mean it's incredible the success of your company and when I look at Silicon Valley in general success is mainly related also to a platform approach and it's a new management concept and of course many people in NVU because you are in this area where you have this exponential growth potential and this creates also some not only NVEs also some how shall I say it's more than NV it's a version against the Silicon Valley model because you can grow so fast what would be your response I think look I think first of all I'm very lucky to have been in Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley is very lucky to have been able to benefit from you know the semiconductor boom and then software and now internet and mobile I mean I think it's there's a huge amount of luck there but the luck also comes from taking many shots you know so many failures you know if I told you all the dumb things that I did you know we'd have to have much longer session and and the successes you know they often are chance I mean I mentioned the Google Brain work that they were just off in the corner it's like okay fine just you know do your thing are you know verily which is our subsidiary that that was a wide range of healthcare innovation now I really started with this glucose sensing contact lens project and that was another one where I said this fellow Baba and Brian Otis who were working on it you know and they wanted to put a computer in a contact lens and I was like you know what that sounds crazy but you know you go do your crazy thing you know you can only have a couple people work on it I'm not going to give you a lot of resources but you know sure if you put a computer in contact lens good for you and yet here they are you know a few years later and they're you know running you know they're doing serious studies now they have a big partnership with Novartis and Alcon and they are you know hopefully going to bring those to market alongside with a bunch of other projects that that has spawned and I didn't know anything about that and I never would have predicted or guessed that I think we're just lucky to have the environment that tolerates you know making lots of risky bets and tolerating the failures that inevitably result and it needs courage I mean I could ask you the question I'm very often asked starting the phone with two people some journalists ask me media people ask me did you ever imagine what is coming out could you ever imagine what what came out of your original entrepreneurial first steps no I could not possibly have imagined but you know and I don't know what you're thinking was behind the form but I remember when I was really thinking deeply about this and this was sort of you know a graduate student project at Stanford and you know I talked to my advisor I was like you know should I really do this entrepreneurial thing and you know might not work out and I can just finish my PhD and and he said you know why not go for it and then if it doesn't work out you come back you finish your PhD which I'm still planning on doing but anyway you know there's like no big deal just give it a shot and and I think that that mentality permeates Silicon Valley and I think that's one of the strengths that you know there's really not much it's not viewed so negatively to try something even if it doesn't work out no when you look back now to this history and you have a I would say many young people listening to you here or via digital transmission what would you out of your own experience give us an advice to those young people who everybody sees you as a role model and wants to imitate you what what would you tell them as a key learning of your own you know I think young people you know in some ways their their life is much easier than you know sort of my life might have been at that stage just you know for I think all of us you know having before whatever if we were traveling to Switzerland it'd be a big stressful thing how do you get in touch with people before mobile phones arrange your travel figure out how to exchange your currency you know there are many things you know we can whip our phones out and look up anything and figure out how to get somewhere there are a lot of affordances that are such conveniences today that make it easy but there is also a global stage that makes it hard actually you know because if when I was in school and I was on the math team or whatever I was just compared to other kids in the school and I did quite well against them you know and I found myself yeah I'm good at that I'm good at that I think I find younger folks today are they're measures of themselves are always especially you know the ambitious ones on this global stage said like well you know I have to be the number one in the world at this or that and I'm like you know that's a really tall order and I think it can be discouraging in a way because if you know you know the spokes say well you know I'm number 1000 on the world at this game which which you know in my world would have been an enormous achievement because that means like you were definitely the best in like your city and your state and whatnot but but it's it's hard and I think you know they get there's a little bit of discouragement so you know I would encourage young folks to you know take chances and pursue their dreams and you know and try to silence out kind of the voices that say well actually there are like a thousand startups trying to do whatever self-riding bicycles or whatever it is they happen to be doing and I think the key is to have fun in your startup but not from the beginning on to think of the IPO which may bring you a billion that's keep and that was certainly not your motivation to make it a success yeah I mean I certainly had no dreams of such economic success and I think you're exactly right I think you should have fun and not be so weighed down by the weight of expectations that I think sort of this global network unfortunately one of the downsides I think it creates that weight we are coming to an end of this fascinating discussion but my last question would be I came from a luncheon and we had a discussion we said as a conclusion was we can address the issues which we have to confront in the world not just in the rational ways the world in some way has to digest this tremendous speed of change complexity of change which creates an emotional turmoil so we have to respond much more also with values and not just with rational answers and what what would be your values what are your driving values again well first of all yeah I think that's a very good question an amazing question and not having been in Davos in eight years or so I'm like kind of even confused in a good way you know because to all these you know business executives and CEOs and everybody everybody's wondering well how are you know how are people gonna find purpose and what about all these you know refugee what about income inequality I kind of feel like I'm a burning man but almost except we're all wearing clothes but but I think it's a wonderful thing so I think for whatever weird reason maybe it's because we're kind of San Francisco hippies but you know Google has always had this a little bit of that kind of social responsibility view also inspired by the way by Salesforce Mark Benioff and his philanthropic work as part of the company I think you're phrasing it exactly correctly I think it can't be the case that companies such as ours are just purely profit motivated you know sort of you can't just take you know Adam Smith well apparently I've learned here that Adam Smith earlier work was actually much more touchy-feely than the wealth of nations but but you can't just you know think about narrowly oh this is your business now you know you're just going to maximize earnings it doesn't matter what else is going on around you and I think the leaders here from I can tell are broadly broadly concerned about to be a climate change or wealth inequality or you know this issue of job creation all of those things and so it seems to me that companies are taking those things seriously and we ought to we ought to be and maybe there's some greater way to to you know write about that imbibe that and kind of the principles of company formation because I don't think sort of you know if you look at the laws and the regulations and you know STC kind of rules technically you're meant to be purely profit-seeking and that's not really a reasonable position to take so again it's a great opportunity to do unfortunate opportunity because I would like to have much more time to conclude this session and what you just said is particularly with let's say some Silicon Valley companies like yours people see those companies having tremendous power and I was recently together with a prime minister of quite an important country who told me three or four powers left in the world one is US one is China and one is alphabet so you have you have this let's say image of a very powerful organization and I think this session was very important because it showed us that behind those organizations are people who are not detached from the world people who ask themselves still questions say do not now necessarily make everything possible to to reign over the world to know so some people who have questions who have doubts who are in your case I may say so who are modest so I think this session was very important and I thank you for sparing and our sharing with us not only your ideas but your personality thank you very much thank you very much