Letter #253: Matt Cohler (2010)
Benchmark Partner, Facebook VP, LinkedIn VP | Talk at Techonomy
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Matt Cohler was most recently a General Partner at Benchmark. Prior to joining Benchmark, Matt was the Vice President of Product Management at Facebook, where he was one of the first five employees hired. Before Facebook, Matt was Vice President and General Manager at LinkedIn, where he was a member of the founding team. Before LinkedIn, Matt was a consultant at McKinsey. He started his career in China working at AsiaInfo in their Beijing office.
Today’s letter is the transcript of a talk Matt gave at Techonomy in 2010. In this talk, he highlights four questions and topics that he has been thinking about: 1) media and information transparency, 2) destructive use of technology, 3) growing global divide, and 4) pandemic preparedness. He wraps up the talk by inviting people to stop him in the hallway.
I hope you enjoy this talk as much as I did! It’s particularly interesting because all four of the questions are still topics of discussion and open questions today, perhaps more relevant now than ever.
[Transcript and any errors are mine.]
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Transcript
Hey everybody. I promise I will keep this very, very brief. So I'm a technologist, like pretty much everybody here. And that means that I'm inherently an optimist, like pretty much everybody here. But I think as technologists, and as optimists, we also have a responsibility to be skeptical optimists and to not take progress for granted. And so with that spirit in mind, what I want to spend just a couple minutes doing is just asking a couple of really stupid, overly squishy, overly fluffy, naive questions, some of which have been talked about here before. And I don't expect we're going to have any discussion of them right now, or any resolution on them right now, but I just want to throw these things out there to this group of people to talk about and think about and to take with us.
So the first question that's come to mind to me over the past couple of days, and these are all things I've been thinking about during the conference over the past couple of days, is media and information transparency. That's something we all believe, I think, is on balance a good thing. It's certainly been a big part of my own life and work and something that I'm a really big believer in, in terms of the power that it creates for the world and for people. But at the same time, I look at the things going on in the world today and I keep finding myself asking myself this question. If media and information transparency is such a silver bullet for human understanding and progress and peace, why is it that genocide is still a frequent occurrence in our world? It happens all the time, it's still happening. It's happening right now, we all know how and where it's happening right now, the world doesn't seem to be doing anything about it, despite the fact that the world knows about it, and has pictures of it and has movies of it. So what else is going on there beyond just information transparency and media transparency to solving that sort of problem? That's one.
Second one, which was actually talked about a little bit yesterday, and I hate to introduce a depressing tone into the conference, but I will admit that the one thing that keeps me up at night that I continue to worry about is: I don't entirely see how we're going to get through the next N decades without some really crazy person doing something really bad with a really destructive piece of technology, whether it's a nuclear bomb, or a biological weapon, or something to that effect. I'm actually less worried about governments doing that sort of thing for all sorts of reasons that we don't have time to talk about right now. But we're all believers in the exponentiation--that's a word you hear a lot in settings like this--and the idea that it's a nonzero sum, progress driven story, and that bad things happen, but the good things outweigh the bad things and that on net, things get better. And I'm a believer in all that, too. I think that's absolutely true. The thing that I worry about is, as the good things continue to rise exponentially, the bad things continue to rise as well, maybe not exponentially, but they're still rising. And when does the point come when we cross over some critical threshold where really, really bad things can happen, even though even better things are also happening. And when does that flip to a point where we have a real problem on our hands for the world that can't be fixed? So I don't know the answer to that question, either.
I'll throw another one out there. On a related note, along some of the same ideas, again, we talk a lot about exponentiation. And the power of progress. And the fact that we're all heading ever closer to the singularity into a world where human beings are progressing and our world is progressing exponentially. We all know there's a very large number of people who are still completely left out of that--billions of people. And we talked, I don't remember whether it's today or yesterday, somebody said, Well, there's 4bn cell phones in the world now. That's true. But there's still billions of people in the world who don't have access to any of this. And it doesn't look like they're gonna get access to any of it anytime soon. So we talk a lot about the global divide and the digital divide. What I don't hear talked about quite as much is the reality that if the rest of the world that doesn't have access to these things is moving ahead linearly, at best, while the rest of us are moving ahead exponentially. That means, by definition, that the global divide is actually growing exponentially. And that seems to actually be happening. And I'm not sure if there's anything that we can do about it, or anything we should do about it. But it's a big question I have.
I'll leave you with one more. Since we're coming off a discussion, which was much more content driven and substantive on the topic of science and health than I can possibly provide, and we're going into another one. Another thing that I think about a little bit is is pandemics and influenza related pandemics in particular. So throwing out a couple of stats quickly, and I'll paint the good news picture and the maybe not so good news picture. Good news is the 1918 global pandemic that struck killed somewhere between 40 and 100 million people. The pandemic that struck--the influenza pandemic in the late 1950s--killed somewhere between 1 and 4 million people. The influenza pandemic of the late 1960s killed about 1 million people. And the influenza pandemic of 2009 killed about 6000 people. So if you look at that number, that looks like the story that we all like to celebrate around here, which is going from 100 million deaths to 4 million deaths to 1 million deaths to 6000 deaths in related systems, largely due to better tools, better organization, better information sharing, etc. And Eric Schmidt talked about some of that in the context of predicting disease and Google yesterday. That said, at the same time, people who know a lot more about this subject than I do, and I know roughly the same amount as one of the birds that's getting infected with the flu is that if the H5N1 avian flu disease were to migrate and mutate in the right sorts of ways, which wouldn't be that hard to do, we would likely suddenly find ourselves with 50-150mn human beings dead, like that [Matt snaps]. I have no idea whether that's a highly probable event or a highly improbable event. What I do feel anecdotally is, at least the broad mainstream of our tech economist world, doesn't really spend too much time thinking about those issues.
So those are four big questions that I don't have any answers to. I'd love to talk with anybody about it out in the halls. I'm going to put these questions up on Quora for those of you who are users of Quora, and I'll tag them Techonomy conference, so they're easy to find. And I hope that we'll get to talk about this tonight and tomorrow and also take all these things out with us beyond the conference too. Thank you.
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Wrap-up
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Pandemic preparation in 2010? Incredible foresight.