Today Google’s spiritus rector Eric Schmidt visited AKSW to learn about the newest Linked Data technology and figuring out how to replace the Google’s proprietary knowledge graph with open DBpedia.
Joke aside: Together his co-author Jared Cohen he visited University of Leipzig to discuss their new book “The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business” with students and researchers.
Eric and Jared spend more than an hour answering questions, talking and joking. The major topics were the Internet, freedom of expression, privacy, copyright, and driving on German Autobahn. One of their key ideas seems to be that technology and the Internet can help to make the world better by spreading values such as freedom of speech and ultimately democracy. Generally an agreeable opinion, but as we now have a virtual reality on the Internet, we also seem to have sometimes a virtual democracy or how else could George W. and friend’s succeed in taking over and raiding their country, lying to world public to start a useless war (in Iraq) costing ten thousands lifes on all sides. Especially regarding the latter the internet censorship of the Chinese government (which also was a topic) appears like a rather minor shortcoming.
