From launching revolutions to learning long division, no one understands the transformative potential of technology more than Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. At the Institute’s annual summer celebration in Aspen, they sat down with Institute President Walter Isaacson to reflect on how technology is shaping our world, and the influences it might exert in the years to come.

Walter Isaacson: How much do you think that the revolutions of the Arab Spring were affected by technology?

Eric Schmidt: Every revolutionary uses the tools and technology that is available to them. It’s much easier, thanks to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, to start a revolution. But it’s not any easier to finish it. And so we’re a small part, I think, in a much larger thing. The saying is that you use Twitter to get people out in the streets, you use Facebook to organize them, and you use YouTube to record the results. I’ll take that.

WI: What tough decisions have you had to make now that your products have become such political tools?

Dick Costolo: There have been a bunch. We’re blocked in Iran and China. You have to make lots of decisions about what you will and won’t do in those kinds of places. You’re constantly trying to figure out what you need to balance in terms of letting people in the country have access to that tool and making sure you’re not censoring things that you don’t want to.

ES: In Turkey, we were blocked for nine months because of a single video on YouTube about Ataturk, which was immediately taken down. It may have been that the generals were also a little concerned about some of the other videos that were on YouTube, but no one would ever tell us that.
 
WI: And do you, especially in the YouTube part of your business, try to circumvent that?

ES: The more we circumvent, the more likely our employees are ending up in jail. Our theory in China was that we would create something that was so incredibly valuable to Chinese citizens that the government would be forced to, over time, open up. It’s illegal for me to tell you what kinds of things are censored in China. But since I’m not planning on going there any time soon, I’ll give you a summary: The mayor’s son is arrested. A phone call comes from the police saying, “Delete that reference.” It’s not political thought, too much. It’s the things that are personally embarrassing to the leadership, and especially the senior leadership.

DC: I don’t think people understand the magnitude of how hard the government of China will come down on even simple sarcasm. This woman in China who was accessing Twitter via a virtual private network in Korea retweeted a sarcastic joke that someone made about a local Chinese official. All she did was hit the retweet button and she was sent to a labor camp for a year.

WI: Do you think that the advent of information technology and the free flow that it enables inevitably pushes towards individual empowerment and democracy?

ES: It’s reasonable to expect that in the next ten years, all but the bottom billion will have reasonably high quality smartphones. Whether that produces democracy is I think sort of a Western view. I don’t think you can prove it one way or another. It does not necessarily follow that this extraordinary empowerment will lead to free elections and multiple parties in a parliamentary system. Those came out of much more complicated sociological and societal events.

WI: Dick, how do you think about Twitter in a larger social context?

DC: We’ve talked for years and years about the fact that technology removes these barriers of time and distance between people’s communication. It’s become almost trite to talk about it. But I think it’s so eliminated the barriers of time and distance, and all these other artificial barriers. And that will afford all sorts of opportunities in government and education. Salman Rushdie uses Twitter all the time. He gets in these remarkable conversations with other literary figures on Twitter about fiction. And if you follow all of them, you will get a remarkable education in how to craft a character and how they think about character and how they think about each other’s works. It’s remarkable.

And it’s all free. So I would think if you were teaching a creative writing course, one of the things you would do is gather a list of these remarkable authors who are giving you all this advice for free and bring it into the classroom.

WI: What do you see as the next big things that are going to happen in the digital realm?

DC: I think it will be something that emerges out of the fact that mobile computing is very close to being ubiquitous, something that we probably can’t conceive of yet. It so changes the way people interact with their world, the fact that they’ve got an always-on device with them that’s sensitive to all this information pouring in to it what I’m listening to right now, where I am. That will foster some sort of innovation or revolution that we can’t conceive of.

ES: It’s the intersection of mobile, local, and commerce essentially on a single platform. It was not really possible until the last few years. This will engender a whole new generation of Googles, Facebooks, Twitters, and so forth. The hottest area of investment right now in venture is in this space of young entrepreneurs—the 22-year-olds who have grown up only with this model see how it can change lives. And it’s backed up by extraordinary developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Computers are very, very good at needle-in-haystack problems and very good at infinite memories. We are not good at either of those. So one way to answer your question is to imagine, eventually, a separation of man and machine, where we do what we’re really good at, which is being human, and technology does the things that we’re not particularly good at. They remember everything, they make very deep suggestions, they follow serendipity, they keep you entertained and educated.