Sergey Brin and Larry Page Look at the Future

 Futurology  

For anyone curious about what goes on at Google, listening to Larry Page and Sergey Brin talk together is a pretty rare opportunity. In a recent discussion with venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, the mix of Page's deep philosophical ideas, and Brin's humor makes for interesting viewing.

G
oogle co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had an informal discussion recently with billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. During the chat, the co-founders talked about Google's early days, its current projects, and its future.

The pair questioned our present economic system that keep us working 40+ hour work-weeks.

Page and Brin, who rarely take the stage together for interviews, began the talk with Khosla recalling Google's aborted sale to search engine Excite in 1999. Khosla, who helped found Sun Microsystems, was an investor in Excite at the time. Page and Brin say they eventually pulled out of the deal — worth either $350,000, according to Khosla, or more than a million according to the co-founders — because Excite lacked the "passion" for search that the nascent Google embodied.

Google's self-driving car prototype

The trio look at how Google is now such a diverse company that it is not easy to define.  Previously associated mainly with search, the company is now involved in self-driving cars, robotics, space, and health care.

When the subject turned to the future of employment and the increasing phenomenon of technological unemployment being created by the very technology Google is creating, Page and Brin talked about

"I totally believe we should be living in an age of Abundance, as in the Peter Diamandis book. The idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet peoples' needs is just not true."

"I totally believe we should be living in an age of Abundance, as in the Peter Diamandis book," said Page. "The idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet peoples' needs is just not true."  Page goes on to look at what companies might do in the short-term to extend employment, by running four-day work-weeks or job sharing full time positions between two part-time ones.

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Brin does quibble with Page on this.  "I don't think that in the near term the need for labor is going away," he says.  "It gets shifted from one area to another, but people always want more stuff, or more entertainment or more creativity, or whatever."

Khosla asks the pair about how the economy has shifted from one of labor and capital, to one of ideas, and how most economists haven't caught on to this notion.  "Ideas are disproportionately a large part of the growth of the economy," he states.  Khosla views this as leading to a major amplification of income inequality in society.

Further on, Page talks about how Google's diverse developments are at a foundation-level are interrelated.  The employees are more engaged he says, and they can function more as self-directed project teams. Brin states that GoogleX is intentionally focused on being different than the core company, looking at "atoms, not bits."

At the end of the talk, an audience member asks about what Government 2.0 might look like.  Page talks about how the complexity and amount of rules and regulations in government keeps increasing over time, but is not in pace with the changes in society.  "Despite people being good and well meaning, government will eventually collapse under its own weight."


SOURCE  Khosla Ventures

By 33rd Square

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