IP Democracy: Google's Schmidt Warns Politicians About the Internet

Google CEO Eric Schmidt made some kind of statements to the Financial Times about the future power of the Internet to be a BS detector when it comes to politicians’ statements. (The FT article is here but it’s behind a firewall. Reuters write-up of the article is here.)

Schmidt said that within five years there would be a “truth predictor” that people could use online to check the factual accuracy of what politicians say.

Politicians have yet to appreciate the impact of the online world, which will also affect the outcome of elections, Schmidt said in an interview with the Financial Times published on Wednesday.

He predicted that “truth predictor” software would, within five years, “hold politicians to account.” People would be able to use programs to check seemingly factual statements against historical data to see to see if they were correct.

“One of my messages to them (politicians) is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting ‘is this true or false.’ We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability,” he told the newspaper.

Well, that’s kind of creepy. Even if Google, or some other Internet company, could develop software that spits out something called “THE TRUTH,” or even a probability on the veracity of a statement, whose “truth” would it be? Take creationism versus evolution. Believers in both of those ideas about how life began think they know “THE TRUTH.”

Would Google side with the faithful or the scientists on that issue in programming its “truth detector?” Presumably Schmidt meant that a software tool could be developed to check recent statements against past statements to determine if politicians are engaging in convenient revisionism regarding their previous positions on issues. But, aren’t leaders allowed to learn and grow and adopt new positions? There must be more to what Schmidt told the Financial Times than what Reuters reported.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on October 4, 2006 8:17 AM to IP Democracy