Jared Cohen

In the fifth installment of our continuing series Talking Schmidt we bring you the most insightful lines from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt.

Schmidt, who is promoting his new book The New Digital Age with his coauthor Jared Cohen, responded to UK politician Ed Miliband’s call for “responsible capitalism” earlier this week.

He reminded Miliband that Google is a country… ahem, company powered by profit and projects like wearable computing and self-driving cars better serve Google than forfeiting more of its profits to various governments.

“Google is a capitalist country … company,” he corrected himself, to laughter from the audience. “It’s easy to say you would like us to have to have less profits and have that somewhere else. We will comply with the letter of the law, but we’re trying to avoid being doubly and triply taxes, which would prevent us investing in some of the wilder things we do.”

Expand
Expanding
Close

Google Executive Chairmen Eric Schmidt and Director of Google Ideas Jared Cohen have announced a new book titled, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, that aims to take a look at our general future. The book is in partnership with Knopf Publishers, a division of Random House, and is set to be published April 23rd, with 150,000 copies being printed initially.

Working at Google, both Schmidt and Cohen have strong opinions about how/will technology is shaping our culture in almost all aspects. The book will tackle not only changing technology like smartphones and computers, but also government, technology’s effect on terrorism, privacy, business and more. “This is a book about the importance of a guiding human hand in the new digital age,” according to The New Digital Age’s authors. “For all the possibilities that communication technologies represent, their use for good or ill depends solely on people. Forget all the talk about machines taking over. What happens in the future is up to us.”

Serving as Google’s CEO from 2001 – 2011, Schmidt is more well known than Cohen. However, Cohen has a diverse/successful background, being an adviser in government to both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton and has been a successful author. The group he heads at Google founded in 2010 after his government work, Ideas, aims to being technology to the developing world. He has also written a slew of books addressing poverty. Schmidt has always been known to be a talker, so his ideas combined with Cohen’s bank of knowledge should make for one interesting read.

Expand
Expanding
Close