> In an interview, Mr. Schmidt — by turns thoughtful, pedagogical and hubristic...
> While that philosophy has led to social networks that spread disinformation and other unintended consequences, Mr. Schmidt said he was convinced that applying new and relatively untested technology to complex situations — including deadly ones — would make service members more efficient and bolster the United States in its competition with China.
If the NYT would cast an equally cynical eye at politicians as they are doing at Eric Schmidt, it might actually be productive.
To me, this article is so drenched in loathing that it's hard to read. (E.g., the second paragraph that I highlighted seems to misattribute elements of the authors' opinions to Eric Schmidt.)
"seems to", "is drenched to me" -- your comment is just the usual padding without content. All you're saying is that you don't like it, but have not a single thing about it you can correct.
I’m pretty critical of the NYT, but I don’t think this article is particularly biased. It’s a fairly in-depth look at his actions over the last few years and is mostly just descriptive.
Do you really think the NYT is uncritical of politicians?
They're extremely critical of anything the GOP does, and moderately negative on the populist left. Maybe they're too cosy with corporate Democrats, but those are the same Davos set as Schmidt et al.
If anything, I feel like the Silicon Valley titans have gotten a free pass from the media for too long. It's only in the past few years that issues like data privacy or monopoly power have started to get coverage in major media after decades of the EFF or Mozilla banging their lonely drums.
I'd say it's mixed. Critical coverage of tech corps like Google's market position is sparse, but when it comes, it's like watching someone trying to put up a picture frame with a sledgehammer, because it's only ever trotted out to serve as a political weapon when a publication wants to force the target of their coverage to suppress either a competing new-media outlet, or some unofficial/unendorsed' (mis)information floating around the social network.
It's always framed as, "[thing] is happening, I don't like it. [Platform] is too powerful, they're too big, and they tolerate [terrorism/racism/foreign propaganda]". The article is published, gets rewritten by other journos, [platform] has its censors wipe or suppress [thing], and publication magically forgets that [platform]'s market position was ever problematic.
This happens a lot, both to the right and to leftists with critiques of the established political order.
> Do you really think the NYT is uncritical of politicians?
NYT On Trump: On Thursday, he speculated about treatments involving the use of household disinfectants. Some experts disagree.
From their own WH Correspondent: Once again, wondering how Trump would have fared had he ever run for office in NY and had to face either the NYC or Albany press corp.
... guess the NYT doesn't think highly of themselves at all.
NYT On Biden: We found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Biden, beyond hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.
Later removed because "the [Biden] campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward"
NYT hired the founding editor of BuzzFeed News, whose nearly first article at NYT was investigating NYT's cover-up of Reade's allegations and exposing NYT's collusion with the Biden campaign, in the form of an interview with an NYT executive editor who freely admits it all and can't understand what all the fuss is about.
I agree that the article is a little heavy on the author's opinion — the quote above neglects to put the perils of software and machine learning in any kind of relation to their positive impact, which makes it sort of pointless. Also, headlining a section "I don't care", when the (paraphrased) quote is "I don't care why people listen to me, as long as I have a positive impact", is just ridiculous.
I'm not sure... someone else can probably give a better answer on this! Medicine, weather prediction, logistics and driving aids are a few possibilities that come to mind, but I don't know if those are actual ones.
Even if there were no benefits, I think the quote in question was pointless without noting this. But what the quote actually refers to is a "worldview where advances in software and A.I. are the keys to figuring out almost any issue" — I would say it's safe to say that software has had some positive impact in the world.
I haven't Eric since his comments on the "creepy line" and "if you have something you want to hide, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place". Seems like he'd love to oil an authoritarian apparatus.
Besides military problems, we face environmental catastrophe, which Silicon Valley's ethos that technology will solve it, when it's mostly exacerbating it, and I expect Schmidt will end up more than "wrong, terribly wrong."
Errol Morris' documentary on McNamara, The Fog of War is well worth your time to watch.
The parallels with Donald Rumsfeld's time as Secretary of Defense are remarkable - it seems Rumsfeld was making all the moves and mistakes that McNamara made. I fully expect Eric Schmidt to suffer the same fate.
That idiot ordered to kill president Ngo only to complain later:
> By the mid-1960's, Mr. McNamara says, it was clear that "political stability did not exist and was unlikely ever to be achieved"
You can not call this just an incompetency. He is a type of a person who can not be entrusted with lacing his own shoes, let alone statecraft.
People must stop decrying types like McNamara, Kisinger, Dulles as some kind of "smart calculating types." They were top idiots at the apex of power, and their coming was a prelude to what America got itself in now.
I think there were two huge systemic/structural problems with Vietnam (aside from whether or not we should have even been there). First, McNamara had the wrong mental model of what war is. He thought like a GM chairman, where you want to outproduce and out-deliver a competitor, ie, that it's a numbers game. That was never ever going to work. Second, and this is even more serious, top brass at DoD never called the civilians on the fact that they had their heads stuck up their asses. Instead, oddly enough, they acted like little division chiefs in a large organization: don't make waves, get face time with the boss, make sure the TPS cover sheets are attached, and so forth. This meant that not only were we wrong, we had no system in place to learn from it. There were several new ideas that look quite effective created in the lower ranks. They were all shot down before word got out too far, though. It didn't make the rest of the system look good.
Same thing happened under Rumsfeld. It was, "get on board or get a different job." Many, but not all, just went along hoping to make the best of it from the inside rather than resign and complain (and have their careers cut short).
Interesting that both of those problems could be summed up as "fighting the last war".
WW2 was about outproducing and out-delivering competitors - the U.S. won largely because its collective industrial might built weapons that the Axis powers couldn't match. And it was directed largely through top-down control: FDR and the War Department had broad control over large swaths of the American economy, high-ranking generals and admirals directed huge military operations, and the public trusted their authorities enough to play their part.
I wonder how much of the structure of modern-day nation-states stems from WW2, and how much is misaligned to current technology and problems. Military technology has a way of dictating political organization, and military technology is pretty different now than in 1945.
Good points, but I do think the aside that is invading a country on the other side of the world and murdering a ton of people, all in service of a globe-spanning game of ideological chess, is worth emphasizing a little extra!
>People must stop decrying types like McNamara, Kisinger, Dulles as some kind of "smart calculating types." They were top idiots at the apex of power, and their coming was a prelude to what America got itself in now.
I wholeheartedly disagree. I contend that McNamara, Kisinger, and Dulles were smart calculating types, but STILL the wrong person for the job.
Miss-characterizing past statesmen idiots paves the way and lowers the bar the next round of statesmen, who only need to differentiate themselves by not being idiots.
> Miss-characterizing past statesmen idiots paves the way and lowers the bar the next round of statesmen, who only need to differentiate themselves by not being idiots.
This is exactly what is required, isn't it?
You had no shortage of people from the field of policy studies who got hired to the white house not passing even that low bar.
I don't understand what you are asking and think you may have missed my point . Not being idiots is a necessary requirement but not the only requirement set to be a good statesmen.
Claiming that McNamara, Kissinger, and Dulles were all idiots and above that low bar will do better is a recipe for failure.
McNamara’s Folly is a great book on one of his more idiotic policies, and a great meditation on the dehumanizing cruelty that results from basing policy on false but ideologically pleasing assumptions.
The title refers to individuals who at the time were widely admired -- including of course Robert McNamara. These individuals were of keen intellect, and had been educated at Ivy League and equivalent schools; many had PhD's. They had a reputation as successful managers and leaders who prided themselves on straight talk. And yet, these "uber-men," working together as a team with the best of intentions, gradually managed to entangle the US into the hell of the Vietnam war, by many accounts mismanaged the war, and, last but least, deceived the public about it.
Schmidt and McNamara are similar, but not alike enough to warrant prediction, I think.
Reading through their Wiki pages briefly, the thing that stands out to me the most are the ages. McNamara was 42 when he became SecDef. Schmidt is currently 65. Those 23 years matter on the back end. Schmidt may have the dynamism still, but his career is set and his life's trajectory is on the downslope. McNamara's career apexed with the SecDef role. He was at the height of his working life. Sure, Schmidt is smart and hard working, but that fire doesn't seem to be there like it was with McNamara, understandably.
I'm not an idealist over here, but It's really weird to me that when he looks at all of the US government's tech problems, he singles out the military as the part that it is really important to improve. But I guess it doesn't satisfy his ego to try and ensure the IRS' website works properly when addresses don't work unless they're all upper case.
The DoD is also the single largest conglomeration of systems in the USG. NIH and DoE would also (presumably) be real benefits, but that’d be two different organizations to hack through.
Improve, or get his cut from? Schmidt is invested in several military startups and of course Google. So he’s nothing special; no one wants to make the military more efficient. It’s just a convenient channel for transferring money to contractors while soldiers are short on body armor.
Not only that but does he even have a clue about the DDS and USDS for civil and military digital transformation groups, where they select a lot of people to fix the issues he's talking about to embed in areas and build solutions? A lot of former SV people (they brag about ex Googlers) so this comes off as pretty funny and tone deaf by Schmidt but whatever. Why support existing transformation structures when you can fix everything in one day under a tent (to paraphrase his own words, if they are even accurate)?
But I'm equally mad at not wanting to fix boring infrastructure first, like parent said. I see a lot of high quality transformation efforts, albeit anecdotally, in the military. Can we focus on the more boring civic systems, lest we find out that not only COBOL unemployment platforms are in trouble?
Is it not a sign of incompetence at the highest level when important projects like the IRS website are handed off to contractors who can't get it done?
The apparently-lousy contractor is not just randomly inept. They are a product of high-level decisions to have a slow, inflexible hiring process, to replace lots of in-house expertise with contractors, and to award contracts in a way that emphasizes skill with the contracting process over skill at delivering useful results.
It’s essentially a political problem and a well-known CEO certainly has the clout to catch politicians’ ears.
It’s much more challenging to make software for the IRS, healthcare, and civilian agencies that operate within the United States with direct impact on the lives of US Citizens.
If the US cedes supremacy despite spending 3x what China does, it's because of grift, like R&D for unwanted jets or RFPs written for one contractor. I'm sure Schmidt can introduce them to the free market.
Possible explanation: The military can expend large amounts of money with little oversight - even when there are no results, poor results, or when money just falls through the cracks.
>“You absolutely suck at machine learning,” Mr. Schmidt told General Thomas, the officer recalled. “If I got under your tent for a day, I could solve most of your problems.” General Thomas said he was so offended that he wanted to throw Mr. Schmidt out of the car, but refrained.
Yeah because exactly what the world needs is a bunch of Machine Learning algorithms thrown at matters of life and death and strategic decision making of the US military.
Over the last ten years technology has really turned into a cult. I think Eric should go and watch Colossus: The Forbin Project if he's never seen it.
Imagine suffering a long depression because you're leaders spent the last 40 years preparing to fight a war that is already over. Leaving you unprepared to deal with a pandemic.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] thread> While that philosophy has led to social networks that spread disinformation and other unintended consequences, Mr. Schmidt said he was convinced that applying new and relatively untested technology to complex situations — including deadly ones — would make service members more efficient and bolster the United States in its competition with China.
If the NYT would cast an equally cynical eye at politicians as they are doing at Eric Schmidt, it might actually be productive.
To me, this article is so drenched in loathing that it's hard to read. (E.g., the second paragraph that I highlighted seems to misattribute elements of the authors' opinions to Eric Schmidt.)
"NYT dislikes this guy so much it's distracting. I wish they did this with most politicians."
They're extremely critical of anything the GOP does, and moderately negative on the populist left. Maybe they're too cosy with corporate Democrats, but those are the same Davos set as Schmidt et al.
If anything, I feel like the Silicon Valley titans have gotten a free pass from the media for too long. It's only in the past few years that issues like data privacy or monopoly power have started to get coverage in major media after decades of the EFF or Mozilla banging their lonely drums.
It's always framed as, "[thing] is happening, I don't like it. [Platform] is too powerful, they're too big, and they tolerate [terrorism/racism/foreign propaganda]". The article is published, gets rewritten by other journos, [platform] has its censors wipe or suppress [thing], and publication magically forgets that [platform]'s market position was ever problematic.
This happens a lot, both to the right and to leftists with critiques of the established political order.
From their own WH Correspondent: Once again, wondering how Trump would have fared had he ever run for office in NY and had to face either the NYC or Albany press corp.
... guess the NYT doesn't think highly of themselves at all.
NYT On Biden: We found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Biden, beyond hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.
Later removed because "the [Biden] campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward"
The NYT is flaming garbage.
NYT hired the founding editor of BuzzFeed News, whose nearly first article at NYT was investigating NYT's cover-up of Reade's allegations and exposing NYT's collusion with the Biden campaign, in the form of an interview with an NYT executive editor who freely admits it all and can't understand what all the fuss is about.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/business/media/joe-biden-...
BuzzFeed News is the team bringing integrity to the NYT.
Actually, it's kind of fun to see the lefties attacking one another.
More please.
We have somewhat better (but still bad) image search, and somewhat better (but still bad) machine translations. Anything else?
Even if there were no benefits, I think the quote in question was pointless without noting this. But what the quote actually refers to is a "worldview where advances in software and A.I. are the keys to figuring out almost any issue" — I would say it's safe to say that software has had some positive impact in the world.
You forget what the NYT produces... it is Manufacturing Consent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
Then came Vietnam. Eventually McNamara would admit
> "We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."
You can read more in "McNamara Recalls, and Regrets, Vietnam" https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/09/world/mcnamara-recalls-an....
Besides military problems, we face environmental catastrophe, which Silicon Valley's ethos that technology will solve it, when it's mostly exacerbating it, and I expect Schmidt will end up more than "wrong, terribly wrong."
The parallels with Donald Rumsfeld's time as Secretary of Defense are remarkable - it seems Rumsfeld was making all the moves and mistakes that McNamara made. I fully expect Eric Schmidt to suffer the same fate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5LsRRTvPigY
It's (IMHO) not as good as The Fog of War, but it's still very much worth a watch.
I wonder who the Roman or Byzantine McNamaras are? Surely our foolishness extents deep into the past.
> By the mid-1960's, Mr. McNamara says, it was clear that "political stability did not exist and was unlikely ever to be achieved"
You can not call this just an incompetency. He is a type of a person who can not be entrusted with lacing his own shoes, let alone statecraft.
People must stop decrying types like McNamara, Kisinger, Dulles as some kind of "smart calculating types." They were top idiots at the apex of power, and their coming was a prelude to what America got itself in now.
WW2 was about outproducing and out-delivering competitors - the U.S. won largely because its collective industrial might built weapons that the Axis powers couldn't match. And it was directed largely through top-down control: FDR and the War Department had broad control over large swaths of the American economy, high-ranking generals and admirals directed huge military operations, and the public trusted their authorities enough to play their part.
I wonder how much of the structure of modern-day nation-states stems from WW2, and how much is misaligned to current technology and problems. Military technology has a way of dictating political organization, and military technology is pretty different now than in 1945.
Is this because the journalists reported in line of thought of the outlet they were working for?
I wholeheartedly disagree. I contend that McNamara, Kisinger, and Dulles were smart calculating types, but STILL the wrong person for the job.
Miss-characterizing past statesmen idiots paves the way and lowers the bar the next round of statesmen, who only need to differentiate themselves by not being idiots.
This is exactly what is required, isn't it?
You had no shortage of people from the field of policy studies who got hired to the white house not passing even that low bar.
May I know, who are you?
Claiming that McNamara, Kissinger, and Dulles were all idiots and above that low bar will do better is a recipe for failure.
"The Best and the Brightest" (https://www.amazon.com/Best-Brightest-David-Halberstam/dp/04...)
The title refers to individuals who at the time were widely admired -- including of course Robert McNamara. These individuals were of keen intellect, and had been educated at Ivy League and equivalent schools; many had PhD's. They had a reputation as successful managers and leaders who prided themselves on straight talk. And yet, these "uber-men," working together as a team with the best of intentions, gradually managed to entangle the US into the hell of the Vietnam war, by many accounts mismanaged the war, and, last but least, deceived the public about it.
Reading through their Wiki pages briefly, the thing that stands out to me the most are the ages. McNamara was 42 when he became SecDef. Schmidt is currently 65. Those 23 years matter on the back end. Schmidt may have the dynamism still, but his career is set and his life's trajectory is on the downslope. McNamara's career apexed with the SecDef role. He was at the height of his working life. Sure, Schmidt is smart and hard working, but that fire doesn't seem to be there like it was with McNamara, understandably.
http://archive.is/RN8ZA
Obviously these problems are difficult in some way, otherwise they would have been solved, but at least pick problems that are worth solving.
But I'm equally mad at not wanting to fix boring infrastructure first, like parent said. I see a lot of high quality transformation efforts, albeit anecdotally, in the military. Can we focus on the more boring civic systems, lest we find out that not only COBOL unemployment platforms are in trouble?
Problems like the IRS website are are about incompetence at the lowest levels, not incompetence at the highest levels.
The apparently-lousy contractor is not just randomly inept. They are a product of high-level decisions to have a slow, inflexible hiring process, to replace lots of in-house expertise with contractors, and to award contracts in a way that emphasizes skill with the contracting process over skill at delivering useful results.
It’s essentially a political problem and a well-known CEO certainly has the clout to catch politicians’ ears.
Also, Schmidt could solve a lot of problems by stopping the censorship of non-mainstream content on Google Search, YouTube and possibly elsewhere.
Finally, he could solve a bunch of problems by _stopping_ Google's collaboration with the US government and the NSA.
Yeah because exactly what the world needs is a bunch of Machine Learning algorithms thrown at matters of life and death and strategic decision making of the US military.
Over the last ten years technology has really turned into a cult. I think Eric should go and watch Colossus: The Forbin Project if he's never seen it.
That being said, I am not American, so my opinion on this is irrelevant.