Eric Schmidt

The reason I focus on the US and China is they're the only two countries where people are crazy enough to spend the billions and billions of dollars that are required to build this new vision.

Europe, which would love to do it, doesn't have the capital structure to do it.

Most of the other countries, not even India, has the capital structure to do it all they wish to.

Arabs don't have the capital structure to do it, although they're working on it.

So this fight, this battle, will be the defining battle.

I'm worried about this fight.

Dr. Kissinger talked about the likely path to war with China was by accident.

and he was a student of World War I. Of course, World War I started with a small event, and it escalated over that summer in, I think, 1914.

And then there was this horrific conflagration.

You can imagine a series of steps along the lines of what I'm talking about that could lead us to a horrific,

global outcome.

That's why we have to be paying attention.

It's really important that we stick to the values that we have in our society.

I am very, very committed to individual freedom.

It's very easy for a well-intentioned engineer to build a system which is optimized and restricts your freedom.

So it's very important that human freedom be preserved in this.

A lot of these are not technical issues, they're really business decisions.

It's certainly possible to build a surveillance state, but it's also possible to build one that's freeing.

The conundrum that you're describing is because it's now so easy to operate based on misinformation, everyone knows what I'm talking about,

that you really do need proof of identity.