USA's Leading Dissident Voice | Noam Chomsky | Talks at Google

We are delighted to welcome Noam Chomsky here today. Mr. Chomsky has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the past 50 years, where he is Institute Professor Emeritus in the department of linguistics and philosophy. His work is widely recognized as having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works that have been translated into numerous languages ​​around the world and we are delighted to welcome him to Google Cambridge today. Thank you very much, thank you very much for taking the time to be here. I'm just going to jump right into this since we have such limited time.

My name is Husten. Hi, I'm a software engineer here and I have nothing to do with Linguistics, okay, or politics. Well, we are or anything relevant, perfect, we are a perfect team, but. I have so many questions for you that I wanted to ask you about your academic focus has been linguistics, you obviously know a lot about many other things and I'm wondering what makes something interesting to you, several factors, first of all it has to be challenging intellectual, secondly, it has to have some meaning and there are many different dimensions of meaning, so, for example, things that have an impact on human life and then, in fact, survival are of course meaningful even if they don't have it.

They pose a very serious intellectual challenge, on the other hand, things that pose a very serious intellectual challenge like, for example, how is it possible that human beings can do what you and I are doing now, which is beyond the ability of any other organism that poses a very big challenge? significant intellectual challenge is human importance when you really look at the details, you can debate, so there are different dimensions, different factors, um, but essentially the same as what a four-year-old finds interesting, you want to understand something about the world that you want to do. something important I think many of us lose the curiosity of a four year old as we get older, which has kept you curious in that way, obviously you have diversified so much throughout your life from your focus on Linguistics , you have branched out.

A lot of things are taken from there, um, is it just something interesting to understand Humanity or is there something else, not that it matters much, but in fact it's the other way around. I was very involved in that. political life social issues long before you ever heard of linguistics, so tell us that you were involved in a lot of political activism, more or less before and throughout your life, how did you get started with that? I drove by it and, uh, what attracted you? I grew up in the 1930s, which was a pretty interesting period in some ways a bit like today and in others quite different.

Objectively, it was much harsher than today, so conditions during the Depression here in America were much worse than they are today. Subjectively, it was a much more optimistic period. Today it is surprising to see the anger and hopelessness. I get a dozen letters every night from mostly young people saying the world is horrible, what can I do? Then there is no hope. It was pretty different, not across the country, if you were a farmworker fleeing the Dust Bowl, it was pretty horrible, but in the circles that were my own military, which were mostly first-generation immigrants, working class at the time. , mostly unemployed. part of the very active militant working class culture of the time, it was quite hopeful that there was a sense that somehow we can get through all this through solidarity by working together.

I was an educated community, even people who had never been to a couple of years of primary school, but discussing the latest varieties of Freudian psychoanalysis, the last concert of the Budapest String Quartet, etc., that was workers' education, it took carried out largely through the unions, it was simply a feeling of hope, expectation, solidarity. We can do things, there was a moderately understanding Administration, very different from the current one, and it was possible to achieve some achievements that did not end the Depression, but softened the edges and made it look like we could create a better future, objectively much worse, but subjectively much better and then of course in the background there was what was happening in Europe, the spread of fascism, which was very frightening.

I am old enough to remember listening to the Nberg demonstrations and Hitler's speeches on the radio. I didn't understand the words but there was no doubt what it meant and of course actually the first one is a bit ironic I guess but my wife and I were in Barcelona at the time of the November 8 elections and the attitude in Europe it was that the roof is falling. in you know, it was this is the end of the world, you know and it happens that the first article I wrote that I remember at least was about the fall of Barcelona, ​​so I can easily date it to February 1939.

I hope the article has disappeared . I'm sure it's not very memorable. I was editor of the fourth grade newspaper and probably the only reader, except maybe my mother, I don't know, but the article I remember was essentially about the rise of fascism, you know, Austria, Czechoslovakia, poop. Barcelona seemed inexurable, this monstrous shadow stretched across the world and this was long before the Holocaust, you know, that's the background, on the other hand, that was what was happening more within my reach when I was about 12. In Philadelphia, about 100 miles from New York, when I was 11 or 12, my parents let me go alone to New York by train and stay with relatives and wander around anarchist bookstores and Union Square.

I wonder how many parents are in the audience? thinking about sending his 12 year old son on a train from Philadelphia, it was a much more peaceful moment, it's quite dramatic. I mean, in those days in New York you could walk, say, along the river Riverside Drive or Central Park at night, huh. Without any worries, you know that many things changed after World War II. I don't know exactly why, but the cities became much more dangerous hostile places, there were a lot of conflicts, you know there were, you didn't know it if you were Irish. You didn't go to the Italian neighborhoods and that kind of thing, but they weren't going to kill you.

For me, you might have been chased or I spent a lot of my childhood running away from Irish Catholic kids because they were too scary. but they weren't going to shoot you, you know, or stab you or anything like that. Everything changed for some reason after World War II. I don't understand why all over the world there are surprising incidents here, so you talk about this general feeling. Although the people are the very hopeful public and around parts of the public, at least parts of it, not the people that John Stein was writing about and you talk about an administration at the time that was perhaps more understanding than the one that Now um, we leave aside the administrative part of that for the moment.

Do you feel like that hope has evaporated? Do you feel that we have been able to take advantage of the fact that in times of need you talk about it as if you knew it? it's very much in the past tense, it's intentional, I think it's still there, in fact, take a look at the last election, the November election, uh, it was nice, there were two surprising aspects, one of them not very surprising, i.e. , in the Republican primaries, uh. uh, a person who was hated by the establishment but who happens to be a billionaire won the nomination.

Okay, it's a surprise, but not surprising, that a billionaire con artist would win a nomination. What's happening on the Democratic side is much more dramatic, uh, uh, someone. An unknown emerged, no one had heard of him, he had no support from any of the sources of wealth and power, no corporate support, no funding from the rich, he even used a scare word socialist, which loosely means social democratic, in fact, His policies wouldn't surprise Eisenhower much, that's a sign of the strong rightward shift across the Spectrum, but from the point of view of the existing Spectrum, it seemed very far away; he would have won the Democratic Party nomination if he hadn't.

It has not been due to the machinations of the leaders of the Obama Clinton party, that is a break with more than 100 years of American political history. I mean, the US elections are practically bought. You can literally predict eligibility pretty well just based on simple variables like campaign. spending is notable, not just president, there's an interesting recent study by Tom Ferguson, who did the primary work on this in the political science department at UMass, he and some colleagues published a study of congressional elections last year from about 1980 to the presidency and just asking what the relationship is between campaign finance and electability, which of course means that politics is pretty much a straight line, you just don't get results like that in the social sciences, it's surprising and The same applies to presidential elections and is known for Long ago, in the 1890s, there was a very famous campaign manager, Mark Hannah, who was the star of campaign management.

He was once asked what it takes to win an election and he said you need two things: the first is money and I forget what the second is, which was in 1895, long before citizens united or anything else. Here comes Sanders and he just broke the 100+ year pattern. He is amazing and also thanks to Fox News we know that he is the most popular political figure. in the country's polls, which run by an enormous margin and among young people, enormous. Well, what does that mean? That means there are real signs of hope. It's out of uh, you know, these two unestablished figures won over the public, of course, not the establishment assures. himself who controls the political system, uh, and the decisions so Trump can criticize Wall Street and Goldman Sachs on the campaign trail, but take a look at his cabinet, okay, so they make sure they basically run the show , but they are losing population and The same thing is happening in Europe, the French elections were a good example, two candidates from outside the two political parties, although the thrust of politics will not continue to be that different, you know, but that is a sign of potential changes if we can ever have The functioning again you know, partially recreating a function in democratic societies could be quite different, so step back for a moment and then, to political activism in your life, what do you remember? of your career, let's say, in political activism as one of the These are the moments that defined me, well, what defined me were things like Um, those of you who know New York City in those days.

Union Square used to be a kind of radical office center FR ARB, for example, the Yiddish. The anarchist movement had its offices there and others and if you went down Fourth Avenue, which is now gentrified, there were little bookstores with u um, many of them run by European immigrants, some of those who gravitated were refugees from Spain. people who fled after the crushing of the anarchist revolution in 1937 and I collected all kinds of pamphlets understanding that I learned many things that are just appearing in the news now, for example, now you can read books that point out a little. deceptively that in the 1930s, in theory, the United States, the Roosevelt administration was following a policy of neutrality, they do not support either side, the fascists or the Republic, in fact, they were supporting the fascists and I learned it in 1939 when reading pamphlets and left.

Wing literature and others who exposed the fact that U, the Texco oil company, run by an absolute Nazi, did not even hide it, had contracts with the Republic to supply oil, in the middle of the conflict, it changed and started supplying. oil to the fascist forces to Franco questions were asked the state department denied it turned out to be true it was reported in the leftist press and oil was the only thing that the Germans and the Italians the fascist countries could not supply Franco's forces did not they had so they needed it and Roosevelt and the state department pretended they didn't see it only the small leftist press saw it, later it was admitted that now it is more or less in the academic field, at least it is More or less I recognized it some years later, but I knew that in 1939 just by walking around the leftist offices, uh, that and you could see what was going on, um, I mean, you know, the Rosevelt administration was very bitter and angry when they found a Mexican.

An American businessman who had sold a couple of pistols to the Republic, you know, violating the Neutrality Act, a big sentence while the major Texas oil company was tearing up its contracts with the Republic and passing them to the fascists. Well, that's an educational experience. I also learned things about the The civil war in Spain I was not just the republicans against the fascists, there was a popular revolution in 1936, the libertarian Revolution that was quite successful and was crushed, it was crushed by the joint efforts of thefascists, communists and liberal democracies. They had many differences, but there was one thing they agreed on: you can't have a free society, you can't have a libertarian society, so they cooperated in that the attack was actually led by the communists, who were the party of the police force. and the little bisi and very opposed to any form of socialist or left-wing activism, well, I mean, those are things that you learn if you pay attention and they were reinforced by other parts of my family environment at that time in New York, could you tell oh really?

It was a very lively political scene. Every variety of leftist politics you can imagine was hotly debated. The fact is, it was a friend of mine who is a philosopher from Colombia who told me recently that he and his wife got a place at Cat Skills to hang out in the summer. It turns out that there are retirement communities there. He said people in retirement communities are still debating what kind of Trotskyism was correct. The same arguments that they we had in the 1930s, it is worth remembering that the education of the working class was a very serious phenomenon, then it goes back to the end of the 19th century, here at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in industry, If an Irish blacksmith could get enough money, he would hire a boy.

Reading to him while he works and read meant what we now call classical, modern and contemporary literature. There were young women from the Farms called Factory Girls who were forced to enter the textile mills in eastern New England and had their own publications. They read them bitterly condemned the fact that the industrial system was depriving them of their culture and their dignity. its independence you're selling yourself not what it produces you know it's quite different and part of that was an attack on the same culture In England there's actually a massive and interesting study done by a guy called Jonathan Rose on the habits reading of the English working class and their own conclusion is that they were better educated than the aristocrats they did not attend, they may not have gone to school.

I know they certainly didn't go to Oxford, but they were the working class, the rising working class had their own institutions of education and culture, which was significant, a lot of that has been destroyed, it's in all sorts of ways, Google doesn't help . but that's another happy story of doing our part so I asked you about political activism and you talk about learning a lot what part of that is what part of the activism uh you participated in and that was decisive for me I was 12 years old you I don't know much about activism, but actually the type of activism that I was primarily involved in in those years was within what is now called anti-Zionist at that time I was Zionist, I was my parents and my immediate family were deeply rooted in the entire Hebrew Renaissance Renaissance of the connections of Jewish culture with Palestine and so on.

I grew up with that and my own actual activism, most of the activism was internal to that system, it was what is now called anti-Zionist, it was strongly opposed to a Jewish state and support for the cooperation of the Jewish Arab working class in Palestine with everything type of ideas about how to create a society based on cooperatives and so on, that died in 1948, but at that time something was alive that you could be part of and it spread to other things like there was not much activism, but when the British They conquered Greece in 1944 and carried out a brutal repression of the anti-fascist forces in Greece, there were a couple of us who tried. a Pro protest whatever that meant and when you're 15, you know, and you got really involved physically, well, there wasn't much you could do, it was right in the middle of the war and there was a lot of dedicated patriotism, you know? the dedication to the war effort, bringing these things up was when the war started, the political ferment waned because of the commitment to the war effort, uh, and it was just that it overwhelmed everything else, it was still present like it was in the high school in the early '40s and it happened that the high school I was at was right next to a prisoner of war camp.

We are mostly German prisoners and in those days security meant a chain link fence so no it was no big deal we could and a lot of the students were kind of ridiculing and shouting at the German PWS and a couple of us strongly objected to that, we tried, you know, to try to get them to understand that, but there was, you know, there could be something like I said, it's not violent in the way. Today it's sure to be the kind of thing that young people do, you know, they were kids, of course, segregated, but we tried with a couple of us, maybe two or three, to try to change the mood of the kids. students to understand that these The kids on the other side of the fence are not criminals, so it's fascinating.

What do you mean we try to change the mood? That speech to talk to people is education and these are high school students having an intellectual speech about the prisoner of war camp. next to the high school is probably easier for high school students than on the Harvard faculty. Oh, I guess you'll forgive me for being a product of my own time where I can't even imagine a high school next to a prison. of War Camp well and separated by a wire fence, true, you became a little more active perhaps politically later in your life, so at least you were publicly articulate, but political activism never changed, it actually declined in the '50s and 50.

They were a pretty quiet period, um, political activism was quite individual, not a lot of things were happening, there were things in the background, but it was a pretty quiet conformist period, but then you know, in the '60s and early '60s , everything changed, everything changed and you became so very publicly active um, but it wasn't a big change for me, you personally I'm just a different sphere, you know, I see, so what prompted you to become more publicly active? Well, John F. Kennedy, uh, so it's still kind of like that. off the agenda in 1961 and 62 Kennedy very drastically escalated the Vietnam War, it was horrible enough, the perhaps 60 or 70,000 South Vietnamese who had already been killed by the regime that the United States had imposed in the 1950s, but it was a little bit under the radar like if you weren't looking, you could figure it out, but you didn't see much in '61 and '62, the repression of the South Vietnamese regime that we had installed in violation of the Geneva course had become so harsh that A popular rebellion arose and the north actually opposed it because they didn't want to build the country, not get involved in a conflict with the US, but the National Liberation Front with Viet Kong propaganda calls were starting to cause them to start. to develop and they became active in the late 1950s and the regime could not contain them, so there was a crisis.

Kennedy Kennedy decided to escalate the war. The US Air Force began bombing South Vietnamese targets with South Vietnamese markings as if the planes had South Vietnamese markings, but. no one is fooled. I found out myself in a small article, maybe 10 lines on the back page of the New York Times, which happened to mention that the US Air Force bombed South Vietnamese targets and, uh, the author Napal started the chemical warfare. war to try to destroy crops and livestock to starve the population, they began programs to take people to what amounted to concentration camps, they called them strategic villages where peasants were expelled from their lands, driven to these places to urban slums and official rhetoric. was to protect them from gorillas, which in fact the government knew very well that they were supporting, it was not widely reported, but if you look closely and know from my own experience back in the late '30s and early '40s, I knew that they really I had to look carefully, you don't look at the headlines, you have to piece together what's behind them, like the Texo story, and it was pretty clear that there was a sharp escalation of the war, so I tried to become active what it meant to be active at that moment, giving a talk to a couple of people in someone's living room or maybe in a church where there were four people, you know the minister who was a little sympathetic, a drunk who came in from the street, another guy who wanted to kill you and maybe a person who was kind sounds like a great way to start a movement, yeah it was, but then it changed, but it took years, I mean it wasn't all the way here in Boston.

If those of you are old enough, you may remember, but in Boston, a fairly liberal city, the first public demonstration against the war was in October 1965 internationally, an international day of protest was called, so we decided participate in it and there. It was a march from Harvard Square to Boston Common and it was supposed to be a rally there. I was supposed to be one of the speakers. It was violently broken up by counter-protesters, many of them students. There were a lot of state police, which is the only reason they didn't kill us no one could hear the speakers, it was impossible, yeah, check out the Boston Globe the next day.

He praised the counter-protesters and denounced the protesters because, you know, he dares to question our great country and what it's doing. Then in March 1966 was the next International Day of Protest and we realized we couldn't have a public demonstration, so we had a meeting at the church on Arlingon Street. The church was attacked again. Tomatoes, you know, cans, etc., at that time there were already a couple of hundred thousand American troops were in South Vietnam, it took a long time and the country was practically destroyed. I mean, at the time, Bernard Fall, who was actually a hawk, but he was a very respected and serious military historian on Vietnam. specialist for the US government he was the only non-government specialist who was rightly respected he was a hawk but he cared about the Vietnamese people and was writing at the time' 6667 that he was not sure Vietnam could survive as a country cultural and historical entity under the most savage attack that any region of that size has ever suffered at that time there is barely beginning to be any visible protest, a lot has changed, the country has become much more civilized since then, now the opposition to the aggression and violence is much more widespread, the government simply cannot do something like say that the invasion of Iraq is the first time in the entire history of imperialism that there was a mass protest before the invasion actually took place and it was quite horrible what What happened, I have to look at it, but the Bush administration could never look at what the Kennedy administration just did without thinking twice.

The public has simply changed too much, so over your long career and as an activist in many different veins, you've obviously learned a lot. along the way, um, and it's helpful to share information with the world. You, I, I give you an example that is somewhat interesting, maybe in 30 years it will become known, but take the Texco oil company and U, uh, the Spanish Civil War. practically the same thing was repeated under the Clinton administration uh under the Clinton administration there was one in Haiti uh for the first time in its history there was a free election in 1990 and it was won by a priest Jean Baptiste to whom no one paid attention to him people supported him that were considered not worth looking at Urban neighborhoods, rural areas, a lot of grassroots activism and everyone is surprised that he won the elections.

They expected the American candidate to win. Mark Bazán, a guy from the World Bank who, but RSD, had won the elections. and he instituted the main question is when will the military coup take place? It took place seven seven months later. It's quite interesting what happened, but there was a military coup. A cruel and brutal terror began. The U. in fact tacitly supported him in many ways. 1994 the Clinton administration decided that it was okay that terrorism had occurred so that, with the population subdued, we can now allow the president to return on the eve of the Marine landings in 1994, everyone who paid attention to it was quite public at the time it happened.

To be U, there was a guy at MIT who was working on an experimentation project to allow people to access AP cables, which is pretty interesting because what you get when you look at AP cables is just raw news, You know, things that flow in spurts. It's published constantly, the AP cables feature a story every day, it's repeated, you know, to the editors, here's the big story, the day before the Marines invaded Haiti, the big story was that the Department Treasury admits that the Texco oil company has been supplying oil to the military's Hunter while the CIA and Clinton administration denied oil was reaching them.

I was going to write an article about it, but the article I wrote was coming out two months later, so I guesswhich is not even worth mentioning. It's going to be public news that hasn't been reported yet, you know, those are the things that happen in the world if you pay attention, so obviously you've had a lot of success in reporting on these kinds of things and raising awareness, and that's been an avenue. for your activism I wonder, is this intrinsic to who you are or how you approach knowledge? Why don't more people know Chomsky in the world?

Well, I think there are many, for example, Why is Bernie Sanders the most popular figure? in the United States political figure in the United States by a huge margin eh, who is he, where is he, where are those people who choose him as the most popular person? I mean, they may not be well known, but they are there. You should think of that as a percentage. Of the rest of the people who are active in the same way, very few are as educated as you. I'd be surprised, I mean, when you go to me, people may not know things about the whole world, but they know things about their lives and the situation they're in, take a look at the polls, uh, for what, uh, maybe, say a topic that's front and center in the headlines, health care, what do people think about health care?

It turns out that, for a long period, the majority of the population has supported a national health care system of the type that other countries have, which is quite remarkable because no one publicly defends it when Obama passed the Affordable Care Act in the Initially there was what was called a public option, meaning you could choose to essentially have Medicare. You know, National Healthcare, about almost 2-thirds of the population favored it even though there was no articulate public support for it, it was abandoned, of course, without comment, go back a little further, I say, to the end of the Reagan years , it turned out that about 70% of the population thought that guaranteed health care should be in the Constitution because it is obviously true and about 40% thought that it was already in the Constitution.

The Constitution is just a sacred scripture that has everything good in it, so you must have been guaranteed healthcare. CU. That's so obviously the public, of course, not the elites. The media is not the discourse of the elite, in fact, every time the possibility is mentioned, it is said that it is politically impossible or that it lacks political support, which is accurate if by political support you mean pharmaceutical corporations Cor and the insurance companies etc. yes they don't support it and the way our democracy works is political support but the public is there and they are educated.

I mean, do you know where people get these ideas? For example, the Vietnam War, it is a very interesting revealing situation at the end of Vietnam. War When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, every famous person at the U had to do a statement about it, you know, some kind of stuff about looking back at the Vietnam War and what it meant, etc., and there was a spectrum that I have written. about that happened there's a spectrum at one end he said U was a noble cause if we had fought harder we could have won you know we have to honor the effort actually Obama agrees with this eh that's the hard line end eh, then go on to the type of what is called left, you know, the critical extreme, people like, for example, Anthony Lewis, who was one of the harshest critics of the war, very much on the left, wrote an article in the who said that war would be, I am quoting.

If the war began with clumsy efforts to do good, note that's an axiom, you don't have to give evidence that if we did, they were efforts to do good by definition on the left, uh, what's called the left. , uh, a blunder at CU, he didn't do it. It didn't work, so he began clumsy efforts to do good, but by 1969 it was clear that he was a disaster. We could not bring democracy to Vietnam at a cost acceptable to ourselves. That's the critical ending. Well, you don't have one. give an argument to say that we are trying to bring democracy that is also an act it is a kind of principle that is not questioned it is like 2 + 2 equals 4 well, at the same time surveys were carried out among the public and what did they discover that about 70% of the public said that the war was not a mistake, that it was fundamentally and morally wrong and that it continued as long as the polls were done until the early 80s, now the guy, the people who ran the polls well.

A liberal academic political scientist commented on these results and said, well, what it means is that people were opposed to American soldiers dying. Well, maybe that's what it meant, maybe it meant that they thought it was fundamentally wrong and immoral, like they said, but that concept is just kind of inconceivable, you know, so that's the audience where they were well educated. I would say they were more educated than the elites who wrote the educated elites who wrote the articles, so changing the subject for a moment, um, it's easy to find a lot. of material about you speaking online or you know articles you've written about egregious wrongs in the world and you know the historical background of this kind of thing.

You have a lot of context for that. I wonder how you stay. sane knowing how much room for improvement there is where the levity is in your life and can you tell us a joke? I've looked and I told you a joke Mark I've been looking for quite a while for a video of you telling a joke, it just doesn't seem to exist, well those are the people who make the videos, it's their problem. I was also curious about uh, you, you're obviously very effective at assimilating new information and, um, and digesting that in a way.

In a holistic way, I wonder about the tools, technology, and routines that help make your day productive. How does it work? It's pretty simple. How did 19th century working class people obtain a higher education than aristocrats in England? they use the Internet, they read, you know, you look at what's going on around you, you talk to other people, you have interactions, you read, you learn about things, it's not quantum physics. What is understood at all is more or less on the surface in these domains, it's just a matter of working it out a little easier now, it used to be the case that if you know you want to research something, you know some background and you want to see what it said the press about something in the 1970s, okay?

I have to go to the library to get the microfilm, it's a bit annoying and now you can get it on the Internet thanks to what we call the free market, which means that taxpayers put huge amounts of subsidies into the development of high technology. Next Generation system that is given to private corporations for marketing and profits, so that's the Internet and computers and so on, so now it's a lot easier than going to the library and looking for microfilm, but not that different, I mean. the shift from not having libraries, libraries was a much bigger shift than from libraries to the Internet, in fact, similarly, you know, the shift from sailboats to the Telegraph was a much bigger shift than speeding up communication in a couple of milliseconds with some new technique.

You know, it's a little bit easier now, but not fundamentally different, so the next question came from Rakesh sa. I apologize for the pronunciation there from India. In an interview in 2012 you mentioned that artificial intelligence is going in the wrong direction by putting more emphasis on statistical techniques for M data. Where do you think it is going now and what steps should we take to make it more meaningful for society? Well, I don't know exactly what that quote comes from, but I mean artificial intelligence, what is it? called artificial intelligence, which is just one part of cognitive science, can, like any part of science, go in two different directions, it can go towards some engineering application that may or may not be useful, or it can try to understand something. about the world, those are the options, so take, let's say, the work that interests me most in similar language, one impulse is to try to understand how we can, for example, do what we're doing now, okay? , which lies? behind that, what are the mental operations, what are the principles, how is it acquired, etc., okay, that is one domain, another domain is, how can we get something that is useful to give a kind of rough translation of an article from French to English?

Google translate is fine, I mean, I use it, it's fine, but it's a brute force, uh, uh, engineering achievement, it doesn't tell you anything about how the world works, it just says here something useful like an excavator that doesn't I have. anything against excavators I think they're great, you know, it's a lot easier than digging with a shovel, but it's not intellectually. It is not an intellectually interesting achievement, it is useful. Okay, have you driven an excavator? I mean, no, but I dreamed of doing it. something would be, I would be scared, but I have a shovel, well, we have a base context and a shared experience with it, that's good, so yeah, I think this is something interesting that I think you've talked about.

In the past, the interview, by the way, was in 2012 with the Atlantic. I'd love to break it down a little bit, where would you like to see how you'd like AI research to address these kinds of deeper understanding problems? Every time you learn something in science, what immediately happens is that you discover that there are a lot of new things that you never noticed before and that you don't understand. I mean, scientific research is like climbing mountains, you think that peak over there is the top. but when you get there, you find, wait a minute, it turns out there are other peaks that you hadn't noticed before, well, that's where scientific research should go.

I mean, what I'm interested in is human cognitive ability, which is an amazing fact. humans are absolutely unique in the organic world in a huge number of ways, humans are not that old in evolutionary terms, they are about 200,000 years old, so something happened about 200,000 years ago, you know, give or take, which created a completely new organism that has what we call higher intelligence, which is now used incidentally to create something that should make the headlines of all the newspapers, that we are using human intelligence to create a perfect storm, since the second world war, intelligence Humanity has created means for suicide.

The destruction, uh, the first is nuclear weapons, World War II ended with nuclear fury, it was obvious right at that moment. I tell you personal experiences we had. Now human intelligence had devised the means to destroy everything. That's the nuclear AG we've barely survived. It was not known then, but it is now known that at the same time as the end of World War II we entered a new geological epic, what is called the anthropos scene, where human activities are having a severely destructive impact on the environment, according to the geologists. They debated its inception, but now they are more or less in agreement.

The world geological organization agreed to the end of the second world war, so here we create two huge decks that are capable of destroying us. In the 1970s, human intelligence took the next step. destroy the means to protect ourselves, that is more or less what happened in the new times, when the period of what was called regulated capitalism passed into the neoliberal era, the neoliberal era of the last generation is dedicated in principle to destroying the only means to defend ourselves from the destruction that is not called that what is called is H changing the decision making of public institutions that at least in principle are under public influence to private institutions that are immune to public control in principle that is called changing to the market is under the rhetoric of freedom but it simply means servitude it means servitude to unaccountable private institutions uh the rhetoric those of you who remind Margaret that there is no society only individuals an ideal not a description but she may not have known that but I was paraphrasing Carl Marx Who U in the period of severe French repression I said that French repression is turning society into a sack of potatoes uh amorphous class of individuals who cannot work together who are separated and atomized that is the ideal of neoliberalism, let's turn society into a sack of potatoes, let's eliminate the institutions that people could come together to try to solve their problems constructively, let's transfer it into the hands of unaccountable private institutions that engage in principle to profit maximization, power maximization, of course, that means undermining democracy, that's what has happened.

That's why we see what is called is a bad term, it is called a populist uprising, it has nothing populist about it, it means anger, fear, hatred, discontent, contempt for institutions, collapse of institutions, a direct consequence of neoliberal economic policies that have also led to stagnation or decline. Of most real wages have actually decreased since 1979, when the program began, all this is together and together, what we have is that the intelligenceHumanity has created two means to destroy ourselves and has also been actively engaged in trying to eliminate the only protection. We have against them, so it's kind of a perfect storm, uh, that's what humans have done, how did this happen?

How did we get to this point? How do we develop creative abilities of a unique kind that they have given us? led to extraordinary achievements?, okay, these are things that we should try to understand all of them and do something to not only understand uh another question from OLG shushkov uh from Australia asks how do you think Google can and should handle the problem of fake news we have a big hammer we're digging for nails well by not contributing to it so for example you know the internet is actually slowing down in some aspects one of the reasons it's slowing down is because if you answer you'll say access, says the New York Times, the first thing it receives. loaded there are a lot of ads that slow down everything, all this happens all the time and contributes to the narrowness of the coverage and even the type of coverage because of course it is influenced by the choice of funding of an institution, of course, which it influences. by their funders, mostly advertisers, so all of that is happening and, you know, it's not what people call fake news, but a distortion of the world in ways that shouldn't be happening, so I think real news They should be the ones we just had.

We have been talking about why for the last generation we have built socioeconomic policies and political policies that are constantly developing a perfect storm that could destroy us. That's so, if we could come up with a way to, I mean obviously monetization advertising as the way that a lot of publications exist and maybe without it a lot of those publications wouldn't have the funds to continue, that's not TRUE. The period of the freest and liveliest press in the United States was probably the 19th century, when there was a proliferation of U all kinds of newspapers uh ethnic working class uh I mentioned factory girls, there were others, which happened in the late The 19th century is, uh, in England and the United States.

Which was also a similar shift towards concentration of capital and reliance on advertisers and which has very dramatically reduced and changed the nature of the media in, say, England. , as late as the 1960s, the most popular and widely read newspaper was the friendly Daily Herald. from the social democrats, the tabloids in England, which are now monstrous, were workers-based newspapers, quite interesting, they succumbed to the consequences of capital concentration and, uh, Advertiser Reliance, and became quite different, uh, similar here and when I was a child, several newspapers were delivered. Local newspapers were delivered every day, they didn't have a certain variety now in Boston, now there isn't even one.

The Boston Globe used to be a pretty decent newspaper, you know, but a lot of them had bureaus all over the world. very good reporters and take a look at it now, it basically doesn't exist, it has some local news and the rest is picked up by the New York Times Washington Post AP U, that has happened all over the country, uh, it has a lot of reasons behind it. but largely it is because it has been going on for over a century, it just continues, largely it is the effect of capital concentration and dependence on advertisers, which also affects the content of media reports and that case will cancel our advertising programs you see advertising is a very interesting phenomenon any of you who have taken an economics course know that the beauty, the wonders of the market that we are supposed to admire and adore are due to the fact that a market is based on informed consumers who make rational choices, then you prove all kinds of theorems about how wonderful it is, turn on your television, sit down, do you see efforts by corporations to create informed consumers who make rational decisions, is that what you see when you watch an ad for cars and If we had a market system, what we would see is when General Motors is advertising a car, what we would see is a list of the car's features, along with a report from Consumer Report saying what's wrong with it, etc. create informed consumers who can make rational decisions don't you see that what you see is an effort to deceive you know, a movie star, a football player, a car that shoots into the stratosphere or whatever, every year they spend enormous amounts of capital trying to undermine markets undermine markets creating uninformed consumers who make irrational decisions and

leading

them to atomizing consumerism instead of serious things that is what should be taught in economics courses massive efforts by the community business to undermine markets huh, that's right, it's not profound We all know it, but somehow we don't think about it, and just as we don't think about the fact that, you know, the wonders of free enterprise, like computers , the Internet, etc., were created by the taxpayer in places like MIT right across the street, so I wish we could continue forever.

Em riveted, but unfortunately we ran out of time. Thank you very much for coming. The only thing I will say is that it's not every day that a non-g Google user sits in a room full of people who work at Google and our software engineers and our advertising experts and our market experts in different fields. Do you have anything you want to ask us? Why do not do it? some of the serious stuff is ok something we will answer thanks for