Larry Page on How to Change the World

Posted on April 30, 2008  Comments (5)

photo of larry page
Larry Page on how to change the world

The question is, How many people are working on things that can move the needle on the economy or on people’s quality of life? Look, 40,000 people a year are killed in the U.S. in auto accidents. Who’s going to make that number zero or very, very small? There are people working on it.

In practice that’s not an issue. I’ve told the whole company repeatedly I want people to work on artificial intelligence – so we end up with five people working on it. Guess what? That’s not a major expense. There’s a reason we talk about 70/20/10, where 70% of our resources are spent in our core business and 10% end up in unrelated projects, like energy or whatever. [The other 20% goes to projects adjacent to the core business.] Actually, it’s a struggle to get it to even be 10%. People might think we’re wasting money or whatever. But that’s where all our new stuff has come from.

Solar thermal’s another area we’ve been working on; the numbers there are just astounding. In Southern California or Nevada, on a day with an average amount of sun, you can generate 800 megawatts on one square mile. And 800 megawatts is actually a lot. A nuclear plant is about 2,000 megawatts.

Whose obligation is it to make this kind of change happen? Is it Google’s? The government’s? Stanford’s? Kleiner Perkins’?

I think it’s everybody who cares about making progress in the world. Let’s say there are 10,000 people working on these things. If we make that 100,000, we’ll probably get 10 times the progress.

Posts on Google engineering: Larry Page and Sergey Brin Interview WebcastGoogle Investing Huge Sums in Renewable EnergyMarissa Mayer Webcast Google InnovationHigh-efficiency Power Supplies

5 Responses to “Larry Page on How to Change the World”

  1. Ron
    April 30th, 2008 @ 5:01 pm

    Thought I’d let you know that in Google search results, Google thinks your blog will harm computers. Hm… not sure if you noticed.

  2. curiouscat
    April 30th, 2008 @ 5:57 pm

    Yes I did notice. I followed Google’s instructions which tell you to login to the webmaster center and follow instructions… I did so the webmaster center specifically says everything is fine, no problems with the domain at all, nothing wrong… So I wrote Google over a week ago, not even any reply whatever to their bug.

    I thought it was good that Google was combating malware, but I didn’t realize they were doing such a poor job of validating the accuracy of the claims in their search engine. Based on my experience now I would say their malware attempts are so flawed as to far outweigh any benefit they are providing. It is too bad. I mean over a week to correct seriously bugs in their system? Very poor response. Heck I could send someone an physical letter and get a response and still have heard nothing from them. I really like all sorts of stuff they do but they need to do much better when their search results are providing false information to users.

    I don’t think there webmaster central is very well done. But I clicked through to every single page to try and see if they hide something somewhere and see nothing. It is amazing they don’t even have a communication history or anything. you can’t even see yes our system processed you request from 8 days ago, we just haven’t responded yet. Nothing I can see at all about the communication history.

    My guess is, if they cared about our site they wouldn’t fail to respond for over a week. It is a shame they can only provide decent response times to bugs when the bug is presented by someone that matters to them. My guess is we just won’t get much Google search traffic until Google finally fixes their bug. We have seen the traffic from Google decrease a great deal. But it is Google’s choice, we benefit from them ranking our site very highly (though almost noone bothers now that Google shows the scary message). So when add false claims (providing the webmaster view that their is nothing wrong with the site and completely opposite information to all those using Google to search) and make it a hassle and scary to link to our site and then don’t respond to us when we tell them of the bug there really is not much I can do but hope they improve sometime.

    Or maybe hope that someone that reads our blog works at Google, or knows someone who does, and can get Google to respond.

  3. Sandra Prangenberg
    May 6th, 2008 @ 9:47 am

    Based on my experience now I would say their malware attempts are so flawed as to far outweigh any benefit they are providing. It is too bad. I mean over a week to correct seriously bugs in their system? Very poor response. Heck I could send someone an physical letter and get a response and still have heard nothing from them.

  4. Science Matters » Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog
    January 10th, 2012 @ 4:46 am

    […] Larry Page on How to Change the World (2008) – Science Serving Society, Speech Australian Minister for Innovation – Energy Secretary […]

  5. Loon – Balloon Enabled Internet » Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog
    June 15th, 2013 @ 9:33 am

    If they can get it to work they plan to use ballons to provide wireless internet access to hundreds of millions, or even billions, of people that don’t have access now. These ballons would float about 20 km above earth in the stratosphere (so well above where commercial airline traffic) and they are really playing a role somewhat like to satellites…

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