Eric Schmidt says money boosts happiness only to a point, then meaning and service matter more. Beyond a modest threshold, wealth becomes a responsibility to solve problems like education and inequality through tools like AI.
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So you're one of, if I may say, richest people in the world. And yet it seems that money is simply a side effect of your passions and not an inherent goal. But it's a. You're a fascinating person to ask. So much of our society, at the individual level and at the company level and as nations, is driven by the desire for wealth. What do you think about this drive and what have you learned about, if I may romanticize the notion, the meaning of life having achieved success on so many dimensions?
Well, there have been many studies of human happiness and above some threshold, which is typically relatively low for this conversation, there's no difference in happiness about. On money. The happiness is correlated with meaning and purpose, a sense of family, a sense of impact. So if you organize your life, assuming you have enough to get around and have a nice home and so forth, you'll be far happier if you figure out what you care about and work on that. It's often being in service to others. There's a great deal of evidence that people are happiest when they're serving others and not themselves. This goes directly against the sort of press induced excitement about powerful and wealthy leaders of one kind. And indeed, these are consequential people. But if you are in a situation where you've been very fortunate, as I have, you also have to take that as a responsibility and you have to basically work both to educate others and give them that opportunity, but also use that wealth to advance human society. In my case, I'm particularly interested in using the tools of artificial intelligence and machine learning to make society better. I mentioned education, I've mentioned inequality and middle class and things like this, all of which are a passion of mine. It doesn't matter what you do, it matters that you believe in it, that it's important to you, and that your life will be far more satisfying if you spend your life doing that.
