Facebook-oprichter Mark Zuckerberg is de eerste laureaat van de ‘Axel Springer Award‘. Axel Springer is de Duitse uitgeverij van onder ander Die Welt, Bild en Business Insider. En die uitgeverij brengt nu een award uit voor ‘ondernemers met een exceptioneel talent voor innovatie, die markten creëren en hervormen, die vorm geven aan cultuur, en bovendien hun verantwoordelijkheid nemen op maatschappelijk vlak’. Mark Zuckerberg is dus de allereerste winnaar van deze award, die vanaf nu jaarlijks zal worden uitgereikt.
Naast een plechtige ceremonie past daar ook een interview bij. De CEO van Axel Springer, Mathias Döpfner, was voor de gelegenheid de interviewer van dienst. Het oorspronkelijke interview verscheen (in het Duits) in Die Welt am Sonntag; Business Insider plaatste een Engelstalige vertaling online.
Het interview handelt vooral over de toekomst en uitdagingen voor Facebook. Echt kritisch kun je het artikel niet noemen (behalve dan dat er een paar keer doorgevraagd werd of Facebook gekozen heeft voor Dublin als hoofdkwartier voor Europa omwille van belastingsvoordelen), toch blijft het interessant om te lezen waar Facebook in de (nabije) toekomst wil op gaan inzetten.
Het grootste deel van het interview gaat over Virtual Reality (VR). Facebook heeft zelf Oculus Rift opgekocht, maar werkt ook mee met Samsung om software te ontwikkelen voor de Samsung Gear VR. Op het eerste gezicht wat vreemd, omdat de Samsung Gear als een concurrent voor de Oculus Rift gezien kan worden, maar volgens Mark Zuckerberg opereren beide op een totaal ander segment van de markt. Samsung Gear VR is een pak goedkoper, en zal wellicht een ruimere adoptie kennen dan Oculus Rift. Die laatste heeft echter meer mogelijkheden.
They are different price points and quality.
[…]the Rift is even more expensive than 600 [while Samsung Gear VR only costs about $100] because it requires a very powerful PC to run. So that PC, unless you already have a powerful PC, costs another 1000 dollars.
[…]Because VR is a very intense visual experience and having the most powerful PC is the only way to deliver certain experiences. So for example, we have experiences running in Rift where you are not only looking around, but you have hands where you can manipulate objects in real time.You are playing Ping Pong or interacting with someone and the technology needs to be fast enough so that when you do something, it triggers and sends that action all the way across the Internet to someone else. That just requires a lot more processing power to do well.
Al denkt Mark Zuckerberg wel dat de impact van VR vooral op langere termijn ligt.
We are betting that Virtual Reality is going to be an important technology. I am pretty confident about this. And now is the time to invest. We just announced this week that there have already been one million hours of video consumed in Gear VR and we just started shipping that with Samsung. So this is really encouraging.
I honestly don’t know is how long it will take to build this ecosystem. It could be 5 years, it could be 10 years, it could be 15 or 20. My guess is that it will be at least 10. It took 10 years to go from building the initial Smartphone to reaching the mass market. BlackBerry came out in 2003 and it didn’t get to about a billion units until 2013. So I can’t imagine it would be much faster for VR.
Hij weerlegt ook dat VR ervoor zou zorgen dat mensen zich nog meer afzonderen van elkaar, en dus de sociale cohesie zou ondermijnen.
I think people tend to be worried about every new technology that comes along. Critics worry that if we spend time paying attention to that new kind of media or technology instead of talking to each other that that is somehow isolating. But humans are fundamentally social. So I think in reality, if a technology doesn’t actually help us socially understand each other better, it isn’t going to catch on and succeed.
You could probably go all the way back to the first books. I bet people said ‘why should you read when you could talk to other people?’ The point of reading is that you get to deeply immerse yourself in a person’s perspective. Right? Same thing with newspapers or phones or TVs. Soon it will be VR, I bet.
Een ander topic waarover Zuckerberg uitgebreid zijn visie weergeeft is Artificiële Intelligentie (AI).
The second area is AI. We expect a lot of progress that will lead to really great things in society: reduction in car accidents from self-driving cars, better diagnoses for diseases. Better ability to precisely treat diseases will lead to greater safety and health and many other things.
Mathias Döpfner haalt een interview aan met Elon Tusk, de CEO van Tesla, waarin die vreest dat AI op een dag sterker wordt dan het menselijke brein, dat de machine het dan overneemt van de mens. Zuckerberg gaat daar helemaal niet mee akkoord, en stelt dat, naarmate de kracht van AI toeneemt, ook de veiligheidsmaatregelen mee zulle evolueren.
I think it is more hysterical.
[…] I think that the default is that all the machines that we build serve humans so unless we really mess something up I think it should stay that way.
[…] Just because you can build a machine that is better than a person at something doesn’t mean that it is going to have the ability to learn new domains or connect different types of information or context to do superhuman things. This is critically important to appreciate.
[…] I think that along the way, we will also figure out how to make it safe. The dialogue today kind of reminds me of someone in the 1800s sitting around and saying: one day we might have planes and they may crash. Nonetheless, people developed planes first and then took care of flight safety. If people were focused on safety first, no one would ever have built a plane.This fearful thinking might be standing in the way of real progress. Because if you recognize that self-driving cars are going to prevent car accidents, AI will be responsible for reducing one of the leading causes of death in the world. Similarly, AI systems will enable doctors to diagnose diseases and treat people better, so blocking that progress is probably one of the worst things you can do for making the world better.
Zuckerberg gaat ook kort in op de content die gedeeld wordt op Facebook, en hoe dun de grens soms is tussen vrije meningsuiting enerzijds en ‘hatespeech’, racisme en bedreigingen anderzijds.
While we generally believe in free speech and giving everyone as much ability to speak as possible, in practice there are lots of barriers to that, whether it’s legal restrictions, technological restrictions or you can’t share what you want if you don’t have access to the internet. And there are social restrictions where someone could be suppressing someone else’s freedom to express themselves.
[…]Of course, hate speech and racism have no place on Facebook. We have clear Community Standards and teams to enforce them. In addition, we work closely with governments and local organizations to be certain we are applying the Standards appropriately for local conditions and to identify and remove hateful or threatening content.
For example, in light of the threatening speech directed towards migrants in Germany, we now remove that content from our service.
Ook Mathias Döpfner gaat hiermee akkoord, en stelt dat we van een technologiereus niet mogen verwachten dat ze zelf beslissen wat we wel of niet mogen delen.
And also not to decide what more than a billion users read or not. This would be editorial work, the task of a publisher. I think it would be a much greater threat if a global company with more than a billion users per day used subjective criteria to determine who may read and write what. This is why the debate is misleading. For a technological communications platform, the sole restrictive framework should be the framework of the laws.
Zoals in het begin al aangehaald, gaat het gesprek ook over het feit dat Facebook in Europa nauwelijks belastingen betaalt. Zuckerberg wil begrijpelijkerwijs niet toegeven dat de fiscale voordelen geen doorslag hebben gegeven om van het kantoor in Dublin het Europese hoofdkwartier voor Facebook te maken.
There are a number of reasons why Dublin is a pretty good place. One is that we are still primarily an English-speaking company so having the headquarters in a place where the majority of people speak English is good. We’ve made significant investments in Ireland with over 1000 employees, a new headquarters and now building a state of the art, sustainable data centre.
Als Döpfner hierover doorvraagt, blijft Zuckerberg ontwijkend antwoorden dat het gewoon ‘de regels volgt die er zijn’, en ze op andere manieren investeren in Europa.
In my experience everyone will have a different view of the right level of tax so governments need to provide clear guidance that conforms to a set of international standards that all governments accept. Like any responsible company with international operations, European or American, we abide by those rules and comply with tax laws in the countries where we operate.
But I think it’s also important to look at the contribution and investments we make in Europe. Just this month in Germany we opened a new office, we announced a partnership on Artificial Intelligence with TU Berlin, and we invested in a German based community operations centre.
Gevraagd naar de problematiek rond privacy en data security, stelt Zuckerberg dat dit een issue is die vooral in Europa sterk leeft. De voorbije jaren heeft Facebook al verschillende juridische klachten gekregen vanuit onder andere Duitsland en België rond deze aspecten. Zuckerberg ziet hierin een link met de Europese geschiedenis, en de onthullingen van Snowden en wat de NSA heeft gedaan met de data van burgers en politieke leiders.
Zuckerberg: “I think this is really tricky. Some of it I think is a deep cultural thing where the history in Europe I think has made people very sensitive to a lot of these issues.”
Döpfner: “Because of the Holocaust and how Nazis, and also the GDR dealt with people’s data.”
Zuckerberg: “Absolutely.” […] And it’s recent. It’s not hundreds of years old. So that is something that I think culturally is just much more sensitive. And we can acknowledge and try to understand that sensitivity, but without being here, I think it is difficult to fully internalize that viewpoint.
I think it is also about very contemporary conflicts between governments. With some of the issues around the Snowden leaks and what the NSA was doing I think have scared people around the world and I think in many ways rightfully so. I think that there are real questions there. So it’s a tough environment to navigate. A company like Facebook is at the intersection of a lot of these questions and we just try to do the best to act responsibly.
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