AAAS 2007 Annual Meeting Plenary Lecture: Larry Page

I'm John Holdren the president of the triple is and it is my great pleasure tonight to be able to introduce Larry Page with whom I've been acquainted for at least a little while and it's been an interesting experience larry was Google's founding chief executive officer he grew the company to more than 200 employees and profitability before moving on to his role as the president for products in April 2001 he continues to share the responsibility for Google's day-to-day operations with Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin he is the son of Michigan State University computer science professor dr. Carl Victor paid his love of computers began at age six he at one point when he was in college built an inkjet printer out of Lego bricks he he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering I think maybe his thesis was that Lego printer and while he was in the ph.d program in computer science at Stanford University he met Sergey Brin and together they developed and ran Google it began operating in 1998 and as everybody knows the rest is history I told Larry that the last time I used Google was at 6 o'clock last night when I was collecting pictures of my mentors to use in my presidential address they all came from from Google Larry in 2002 was named a World Economic Forum global leader for tomorrow he's a member of the National Advisory Committee of the University of Michigan College of Engineering together with co-founder Sergey Brin he was honored with the Marconi Prize in 2004 he's a trustee on the board of the XPrize and he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2004 I suspect one of the youngest people ever to have achieved that particular honor so it is a great pleasure to give you Larry Page he will by the way be taking questions at the end of his remarks so those of you who have questions for Larry we'll have microphones and you can line up at the microphones and and take your shot Larry Page hopefully this work well welcome and it's a great pleasure to be here hi hi I was just talking with my communications person Elliot's here and said his father always enjoyed coming to us and I thought you know I wish my father had enjoyed coming to us I'm sure he would have really loved it based on all that I've seen but alas he didn't and you would have brought me to actually know his very dear to my heart to be here I don't give very many kinds of things like this and I guess I couldn't say no science and technology was in San Francisco and it seemed like it'd be a lot of fun to come here and also to see all the other really interesting talks that were going on and it took me a while actually I was trying to think about you know what won't be really important to say to this audience and you know I guess for me science engineering technologies sort of all been interrelated and really really important and thinking about it I feel like we have an amazing set of problems in science technology and what that really means is we have an amazing set of opportunities and I think I'll show you my first slide so I sense my talk notes to a great person we have a Google Hal Varian he's the famous economist at Berkeley and he sent me back this single picture and I was so so a good summary of my whole talk that I want to show it first and basically you see you know for a thousand years BC and so on up to now and it's basically the income per person and you can see there's one big change right that happens right around the Industrial Revolution you know and it's still in fact going straight up and there's basically nothing you can ascribe this to technology and the quote from how actually was virtually all economic growth was due to technological progress and you know I'm not a betting man but if I was to bet I would probably bet that now continues to be the case going forward that virtually all the Risa's and growth that we had would be awesome due to technological progress and I guess being very simple I thought well of Google you know in fact I I realized you know Google would have been possible actually even probably a few years before we started Google it wasn't really possible to have computers fast enough to index that much text you know Moore's Law had been steadily going on and doubling every 18 months and it was actually you know cheap enough and we could afford to buy computers to do it and so on and you just think about that you know something we take for granted is now as you know typing in a few words and searching billions and billions of things and getting them back in a tenth of a second or so and that was impossible before these curves and so I think as a society we're not really paying attention so that's and I think you know the question for all of us is how do we how do we really work on this how do we get our our policies in place and how do we get people working on the right things so now I'm not very good at companies and business things like that but I've been pretty lucky and I think I know I spend a lot of time coming up with the name Google and you know we thought about it Lots and so on and I can tell the science has a serious marketing problem I'm really sure of that and you know if you have basically all the growth that's happened in the world is to science or technology or whatever you want to call it and nobody really pays attention to you then you have a serious marketing problem so I think I have a simple analysis of those two one is that virtually none of the marketers in the world work for science so there are lots of people who specialize in marketing and as far as I can tell none of them work for you all right or anybody related to you guys so okay I don't want to dwell on problems though so now this could be actually at Stanford where I once school for grad school actually looks very much like parts of Stanford and I don't but it's clearly you know an engineering kind of place but I don't want to spend too much time I promise before I let me just summarize some of the good things I'm going to say and then I'll go back to problems so I think there's huge huge opportunities in science I mean talk about people taking more power roles in society about taking bigger challenges and bigger opportunities about communications strategies in general about changing the world and then that leading to engineering and that sounds premiership and then the business and then repeat that and add more money and just keep going about education and making more people like all of you but before I do that I'll talk about problems so oops actually I don't want to do that yes so some of the bad things about science I've been through some of this you know I'm a PhD not quite finished yet as Stanford likes to say and I think there is you know for gender racial national origin diversity in many parts of science it's not uniform some fields are very good some fields are very bad which I think makes less fun for people to be in a lot of those fields it also makes I think the fields less creative there's science being done for funding and I was where a lot of this computer science and I had a simple algorithm which was wherever you see puppy need researchers instead of grad students that's not where you want to be doing research and the funders can never figure this out I couldn't quite understand it but grad students who aren't being paid you know usually pick interesting things to work on otherwise you know they would go get a job and have a good time so there's long long education before earning salary and somebody when I was preparing to send me a Simpsons clip of Bart Simpson making fun of oh god soon for earning $600 a month and cut off his ponytail and you know that is an issue you know less fun at parties sometimes less personal interaction and hard work and there's a fewer celebrity scientists right there aren't that many and now some of the bad things aren't true for instance I think you really have the opportunity when you're in science technology to really have huge impacts and like a schools an example of that there are many many other things you have huge leverage just for understanding the world butter and you know really how to change it and so on and scientific thinking really hugely benefits most jobs and we've really seen that in our company we try really hard to hire a lot of scientific and technology or nyan people even in positions they wouldn't normally be in I'll talk more about that and scientists are really great citizens I think is really important to have them in the world and critical thinking in society now and it really helps you with blue blobs understanding them you know there are a few scientists and engineers in the world so I just wanted to show some brief stats but anyway they're not that many people it depends how you count and who's choosing the stats and so on and there's even fewer that are really in charge of the country and I pulled out some important leaders and there's a few more these are ones with graduate degrees and so on but there aren't that many such folks and you know many of you probably realize that but hadn't necessarily thought about it this is President of India who was the rocket scientist and actually he also understands all the encoding of the Indian languages on the web which is not something as normal for a world leader and I think you know you really you really want to have people and power who understand things and that's basically right and I wanted to show this this is pretty good thing out really you have no you have to write this in less technical terms for me make it even less technical for my boss even like technical for our VP even less for our EVP even less for our CEO and compared to all other technologies there's a big difference in the mouth area this is kind of how countries work I think with regards to technology and I don't think it's generally good thing since that's where all of the economic growths coming from and all the changes in people's lives and all those things and uh it was actually amazing to me so we're you know Google's and technology industry and some point we decided we should hire a CEO and we we embarked on a long search and we were actually more than a year probably search for somebody we have some basic criteria like we wanted them to understand computer science so we figured you know that's what we do we program them and you know produce software and that's the main thing that we do and that turned out to be very very difficult we primarily hired one of the only guys who had a PhD in computer science was Eric Schmidt and just think if you're a CEO you know high tech executive and you're the only one who meets the qualifications that's great right so I'm encouraging all of you take it to God and do that in Eric's a great guy of course there's not he's been absolutely wonderful but it's amazing how few people in positions of power have or a deep sort of technical or scientific background and I have a theory about this too one is that basically has to do with meanings and we try actually very hard to get our engineers to come to meetings so Google and they never do they just refuse they sort of run screaming back to their computers and hash that's true for me to some extent too I really don't like going to meetings but I've fought it so now I've sort of overcome that that issue and I can do that and it's very important still its house and one of the other things we do actually is we actually try to automate a lot of our meetings away with software and so we have simple kinds of reporting and things you would typically do with meetings that we a program emails even so what did you do locks last week and then an email is it to everybody in the group for a little picture of you house so you can feel like you're connected to everyone so um but in case I think it's really important to take positions of power it's really to move along and help the world and the other nice thing about this is that science funding you know depending on how you count in the u.s. maybe 1 or 2 percent of GDP which is pretty small compared to other things and you imagine if that's really causing all the economic growth you know maybe if that was ten percent maybe you'd have ten times the growth right or maybe you'd have even more because it's really sort of an exponential kind of thing and so you know that would have a really big impact and you know presumably that's possible so I didn't heard you too all the control funding at the highest levels rather than funding for all the scraps easy for me to say so this is the 1999 Google super-sized American logo and you notice it's bigger than the current logo we have a wider and what I wanted to talk about here was really working on non incremental work and I I guess I started working on I just thought I'd talk to history really fast the research at Google I started working on downloading the web and my advisor thought was a good idea to download all the links on the web and sort of analyze them and we weren't sure exactly what to do we thought it'd be fun to reverse them all which had been done in other hypertext systems and we thought that would be a interesting thing to do and the links were pretty small and we'd be able to keep them on a small number of computers and so on and I thought this would take me a week well that was kind of optimistic and my advisor Terry kind of laughed at me so yeah I'm sure it'll take you a week and you know a few years later we had a pretty good structure of the web with maybe 30 million pages and 300 million links or something like that and then we realized well actually if you want to allow people to annotate things it would actually be useful to be able to rank those annotations and so we have the only thing we have latex inside of desperation we invented a way to rank things and that's where a PageRank came and then we realized well actually annotations were that useful search was the main application and we should use page rank to rank web pages for search and it was completely random it's a great example of pure research and the reasons why you want to do it no I was really struck actually by Steve twos talk who you stick around you'll see him tomorrow night's giving a talk and he actually had a very similar story you know he's his story which I don't know he's gonna probably tell a different story tomorrow night's you should ask him questions about this but he basically didn't know what he was doing he was sort of failed grad student gave this wonderful talk to the Hertz fellows that I saw and he said I didn't know what to do so I decided I would get really good at building lasers I wasn't really sure why but I thought it'd be useful and you know this eventually ended up with him getting a Nobel Prize and it totally also not obviously but the key thing was that but what the common thread I think in those two examples is rihanna's set of links that nobody else in the world had we have the link structure of the web and we have pretty good techniques for processing you Steve had a razor you know tunable lasers that almost nobody else had and he understood how to use them in ways that other people didn't when you have things like that when you have some basic technologies you find interesting things to do with them right and those things you know if you're lucky really turn it's something big now I think the other thing to keep in mind is really a few people try to do groundbreaking things and we mentioned the XPrize in the introduction I was amazed you know the oh I met the XPrize guys and they've been working for I don't know 10 years or something like that to get people interested in space the family startups money and they got surprised established and they finally got you know how much teams compete on it and then once they did all this they got this successful slice here they had you know billions of media impressions and a huge amounts of interest and there's people now working on commercial space plate and you know the main thing that happened was there's one guy who really convinced everybody just about 10 years convincing everybody that was possible and that was the hard part it wasn't so much once people believe it's possible of course possible because you know we can do a lot of things that you think they're possible so I think that's one important thing to focus on is trying to get people to think things are possible and the way you do that I think is you start with the media that's really where you know most people are paying attention to the media so that's an obvious place to start I think I was just going to use the example of CSI alright how many people have watched CSI well this is pressingly a low number you should watch it it's pretty good show but it's I think probably will have more kind seen you in sort of investigators than we ever need because of that show I assume I don't know ever researched it but one surprised me and it's amazing the things the media that can really have an impact on and I think the other good examples I mean who would have thought a former presidential candidate would start a TV station which is based right here in San Francisco's Al Gore's current TV and he's really trying to make a difference in that space and get higher class things into the media I had some specific suggestions though it's just I thought it would be good to encourage engagement by sort of I don't know want to use tenure and grants money based up partially on media impacts of thing my mother's very there's not a suspicion in science about you know well the science is spending all this time talking to the press whatever but you know if nobody cares about what you do it's not a great thing and you're not gonna get some resources and support and so on it's really important thing I've seen some great programs to fund scientists journalists especially students so you know we can fund a few students for not very much money and have them work at a media organization and write articles and when that's happens there's been tremendously better coverage of those topics you know the media organizations love it because they don't have to do the work them right and they're they're desperate to get stuff so yeah I guess yes triple-s has a great program for a policy support for students where they can go to Washington and help with public policy awesome I think those things are really important those things are probably you know a thousand times the leverage of the other things that happened because of the effect they have on the world now let me just switch to just talk about changing the world so when I was about 12 I decided I want to be an inventor and somebody gave me an autobiography of Tesla and you know who's this great inventor of a electric power and all sorts of things and then I read his autobiography and you know I just got cried at the end because he's basically a failure he couldn't fund his research many of the things great things he invented maybe people don't even know what they are today and so on and you know as always struggling to commercialize this stuff to really get it out into the world I said I don't want to be like Tesla I want to have an easy time getting things out in the world and make a real impact and I think for that you know you do need some integration with business and engineering and the other areas as scientists know one of those is I think science and engineering I don't really separate them because I feel that you know you really want to get your scientific works out there you want people to understand what to do and the engineers are the people who do that yeah you know there should be some mixed and actually my unfilled computer science there actually is no computer science it's only a computer engineering match the computer engineering something different all right that means you build hardware computer science means you Engineering on software and there is no computer science there's no such field I wish I think it's kind of interesting it's really computer sciences computer engineering and computer engineering is something else so and maybe that's because it's a newer set of fields and you're so there's maybe it's not a real science who knows but anyway I think it's really important to get entrepreneurship better involved in universities and and I was lucky enough to spend time at Stanford which is probably the best example in a spent time in Michigan which is not terrible but more normal example of how to do this so no one tells the story quickly about how Silicon Valley started cuz I think it's pretty instructive so this is a chairman at Stanford who basically had a thousand dollars great local jobs so we gave him a thousand dollars and he decided Hewlett and Packard should start a company and that's Hewlett and Packard also Unterman and in 1938 they started up HP based on that and this thing the whole Silicon Valley really flows from that you know and from that all these companies flow directly from Stanford and the whole valley and I think I also convinced Shockley who's the inventor of the transistor has come back and to come back to Silicon Valley and start a small company Fairchild which then spun in that basically directly about to Intel she's still around today of course and important now how that came from $1000 in one professor and arguably office looking valley really came out of that and all the technology and wealth and all that associated with that you know the thing that I really benefited from at Stanford was that whole culture of people so there's tons of people who are very very smart who have had successful companies who you know had management positions who been great scientists and dropouts from Stanford and so on which most of the companies represented there and those people actually allowed was gone that staffer or they fund research there they found interesting projects and that that full cycle is an amazing cycle and it's really what makes the valley here great I think a lot of academic scientists really miss that you know a lot of the research being funded by kind of strange mechanisms here which is great it's really a really good thing so I think you really want to have these cycles in many other places and I don't think you know are we how determined but any of you could go do this and it was you know fair amount in 1938 but not that much money right and so it's really it's not that hard to do this you need to have the right attitude about it and you need to think the business and entrepreneurship are going to be good things and important parts of science so I'll just give a quick example of this this is a SpaceX rocket and I'm good friend Elon Musk who's a internet entrepreneur successful who decided he really wanted to colonize Mars and the only way to do that is to make shoot brackets and so he has his own rocket company and he's got a whole bunch of contracts now to sell sold satellite launches to the government he hasn't quite he launched one Rock and it didn't quite go up all the way but he will soon and I think there's there's a lot of activity in these pieces as people really got involved in entrepreneurship in the technology that and he's hired a lot of great scientists who are working incredibly hard on making this real so education well primary education is clear problem in science I mean I don't have to tell you guys that and I have a radical proposal though is I think universities should take it over so now I'm not exactly sure how to do that but I just feel like universities are pretty good and secondary schools aren't and so anyway but anyway if I was in charge that's what I would do and I think also there's a lot of opportunity to education sort of engineer when this is probably typical situation now that was really my school experience in early school and I think that you should really I think there's a lot of ability to really use technology and to engineer better and more efficient ways of doing education and it just seems like we have better tools than we did you know when we designed our current education system you know when I was at Stanford I watched all the lectures on video tables then I don't have to go to class there's a lot more convenient right before the exam I could watch the whole semesters worth of lectures in about a day and a half and it worked great and I mean I don't think those things are that hard how hard is it to do those things that was not and some of the best classes I took at Michigan had 600 students chemistry organic chemistry for example it was designed for that many students and they had TAS and so on but they had the world's greatest professor as a result it was a great experience that could have been just as easily ten thousand students and so there's gotta be ways to do these things better know hi gave a keynote probably two years ago at first which is an amazing amazing thing started by Dean Kaman where they take that's something like thirty thousands of the finals in Georgia Dome they got too big for Epcot Center and they moved to the Georgia Dome they have like 30,000 kids or something like that in you know building a robots and competing and you know you talk to these kids a lot of them are inner-city kids and so are they have some stats here about the fact that has of them this amazing effect on these kids they really you talk to these kids they want to go to engineering school they have a whole new outlook on life and it's done at a mass scale right it's done all through donations and goodwill many many people so there's gotta be other models that we can use and you know if we're fighting about evolution or obviously something's really wrong right okay so let's get some fun parts so let's talk about solving some worldwide problems how do we get people motivated about science and technology well I think we want to basically improve our lot in life by doing really great things but I think's the matter a lot and one I think the most obvious one is transportation and I'll talk a little bit more about sustainability and energy and so on the transportation is a huge use of people's time of you of the energy in the world and we basically haven't had any new systems since a hundred years ago right we don't have the only computer that's used in transportation is an elevator right this is the only form of transportation that I've seen that really uses computers you can push the button it takes you there right you know planes can do that but they're not we don't allow them to do that we Stella pilots most planes can land themselves now the big ones but of course we wouldn't want that to happen so I think this is really obvious one I think there's tons of things we could do I was lucky enough to be at the the grant the DARPA Grand Challenge for the Stanley this is the Stanford car won by driving autonomously sort of all day through the desert and up and down mountains and things like that so people thought would never be possible and one I've got 10 million dollars or something like that and the guys who do this you know they're really excited about doing automated cars and there's a tremendous amount that they can do I'll just give you some stats 40,000 people in the US die every year of auto related accidents now I'm pretty sure computers were gotten even Stanley type computers that number would be a lot lower you know maybe it's a hundred maybe it's ten right it's a lot lower and it's not it's not that far away and I know also there's probably only a hundred people in the world that are working on them it's that right I don't think so I think that's a tremendous opportunity if you've ever been spending any time in the developing world you know that roads are really a disaster right there aren't really any roads and your average speed is probably 10 or 15 miles an hour yeah it's a big issue yeah you know we're of course two-star roads here they actually take a lot of resources to make and maintain that plan right there which is not particularly high technology you can go faster than your car apart goes about 90 miles an hour and it also goes points point with no road and it uses actually less fuel than your car does per mile and so I'm not so sure that we should be building roads you know you can argue about safety and things like that but computers are pretty good and technology is pretty good and at some point we'll be able to make that really safe and I don't think it's that hard either but I don't think there's anybody working on them for very few people one of my favorite things is artificial intelligence and I think it's it's kind of a very bad rap and actually my dad was very interested in artificial intelligence and in the the time they were doing it at Stanford in other places they had you know the equivalent of a Commodore 64 and they thought they're gonna do artificial intelligence and now your your phone is a hundred times more powerful than the computers to help and now we can't even store a decent photo you know a Commodore 64 we don't wonder why it's not smart right and so I think there's a lot to be said for basic amounts of computation there's a lot of people who agree with me on this a lot of people who don't but my prediction is that when AI happens it's going to be a lot of computation and that's so much cleverer blackboard whiteboard kind of stuff clever algorithms but just a lot of computation and my theory is that if you look at your programming your DNA is about 600 megabytes compressed so smaller than any modern opera is smaller than Linux or Windows or anything like that your whole operating that includes booting up your brain right high definition and so your program algorithms probably aren't that complicated it's probably more about the overall computation but that's my guess we have some people at Google who are really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it in a large scale and so on and in fact to make search better we really need to make you know to do a perfect job of search you could ask any query it would give you the perfect answer and that would be artificial intelligence right based on everything being on the web which is pretty close approximation so I think we're lucky enough to be working incrementally closer a lot but again very very few people are working on this and I don't think it's that far off because people think no climate change of course huge huge issue now I think one of the big concerns I have is we're not doing good job modeling and understanding climate change and that's really a really important area and I think you know there's recent press from this conference on that just today which is the main amazing C but I asked thinking would be nice to be able to modify with climates and one of my heroes was heroes who's Paul MacCready who invented this he built this human powered play and the fuel cost the English Channel how many of you probably don't know but his career started in climate modification and in fact in seeding the clouds that was his first company was designed to see clouds and if you ask him about it it's no it's very easy to see clouds we could do a pretty good job who we could never get around the lawyers so a lot of things are possible right and I'm worried as we get into real serious potential issues the climate changed there gonna be enough people who want to act that we're gonna act in some ways and we're not going to really understand what they are we might as well get going on that now and I don't think very many people working on that either no let's give you another quick example google books we actually wanted to digitize Stanford's library when we are at Stanford and there's actually a digital library project there and we tried to convince people and they they just didn't think it was really possible or made sounds and so on and actually we spent probably five years trying to convince people that it was possible and a good idea but mostly that it was possible and then once we convinced maybe two or three crazy people that it was possible you know it's basically happening yeah we just made like a 1 million we're gonna digitize it or another million books at Princeton and it's sort of routine now or which is a great thing but it shows you know how hard it is to get people going on things that you know they think maybe aren't that possibly all right so developing world I've had a lot of interests there I've been trying to take all of my long vacations now in the developing world I encourage you all to do that too there's a lot of really interesting places to go there's good science be done and there's experiences that you won't have anywhere else and I think you know the u.s. also has a marketing problem not just science I don't know if you've noticed recently but if you travel around the world people aren't real happy with us and you know we're spending a lot on our own security and things like that but I think we should spend a lot more on making friends and and you know that's especially in the Middle East in Africa yeah that's where and there's a lot of things to be done you know there's issues of clean water which there's lots of technological and social and different kinds of issues there's medicine I was at health which there's been more progress being made on recently which is great to see some of our pharmaceuticals being used that's certainly gonna cause a lot of goodwill in the world and food and of course the scientific version of food has represented here and as soon this is genetically modified and lost communications which actually had a big impact a lot of these places I was just in in rural Ghana and you know half the people there had cell phones which is pretty amazing you know it's not that prosperous place but you know it's important type of communications it's pretty easy to do these days and of course poverty yeah I don't know what all the answers are to these things but I do know that if you looked at that curve at the beginning of the graph about how you know we moved everyone away from farming and basic sustenance it was through technology and there's a lot of technologies that can go into these places to try to same as the ones we have here how which can work great which need all of you to do it we've been trying to do trying to do this through google.org and we were lucky enough whom we went public we put about 1% of our resources it's a google.org 1% of our stock and 1% of our time and so on and you know that's now more than a billion dollars now in there to be used and you know we're trying hard to figure out what to do with it what kind of projects to do and so on and mostly the thing kinds of things I just mentioned but we realized that's really a small amount compared to what cuts pencil ready and it's not not clear where you spend it I mean you actually need good projects and there are very few people doing these things so great period opportunities there to make new friends and to have a huge impact now energy environment climates I mean this is been a huge issue everywhere we go and it's definitely real I just wanted to give you some quick fun figures on this so there's been a lot of talk about nuclear reactors okay and uh my favorite statistic is that in Nevada or say some part of the US or the world that has a lot of solar radiation the amount of solar energy that you got per square mile is 800 megawatts average so over the whole year day and nights if you take a square mile Nevada and you cordon it off you measure the heat energy that's from the Sun that's 800 megawatts know you might wonder how big a nuclear actor is well big ones are a couple gigawatts and you know I haven't measured one on Google Earth whatever but I assume with security and cooling towel you know cooling ponds and you know big cooling towers like those they take a couple square miles so for an average new killer actor the energy that hits it from the Sun it's the same amount that it produces so I'm not sure this is the best answer for how to produce energy given all the other issues now I hear muted applause but I'm a big fan of Soler's I'll go through that quickly so how this is in Southern California this is a pretty simple design solar thermal installation and I think it's 10 megawatts or so it's pretty small and you know basically just heats things so he this case it eats oil in this pipe in the middle from the parabolic reflector yeah you know this thing is expensive it's maybe five times too expensive right now they haven't really cost reduced it yeah you know I don't think making a steam from sunlight is that hard and that's what nuclear actors do they well they make steam from nuclear action but you know you can just easily make the steam from anything else there are lots of cool designs for this and again you know there's hundreds of people working on this not thousands or 10,000 and there hasn't been that much work done to cost reduce so I'm pretty optimistic that you'll see and venture capitalists are starting to fund these kinds of things we're trying to fund a few small things that we see that are interesting but I'm very optimistic about this and I think our goal should be once per kilowatt hour electricity and the reason for that is that then there's no economic argument oh we're gonna ruin our economy switching away from coal which is the argument China makes because well we can make a whole heck of a lot more money selling energy at $0.01 kilowatt hour we can make a whole lot more stuff we can have really a big warm swimming pools that are really cheap so wind of course is another huge huge I didn't mention I should back off just for a second I didn't mention the fault of the tank things - there's lots of cool things there and there's lots of interesting approaches and I think there's a lot of promise there the front of a tank you know there's people there's a research group at MIT that's targeting 50% efficiency for solar cells and they have a pretty good plan to do it and the issue was costs but still the efficiency is amazing that means you know what twice the area of your nuclear reactor you could generate C Mon energy is that nuclear reactor so you're talking about six square miles there goes your nuclear reactor not a lot of space right so we can figure out a way to make those things cheap the impacts will be tremendous just absolutely gigantic um wind of course is already cheap in fact the cost to wind energy is already competitive with coal if you didn't care when it was generated now the problem of course it's not windy all the time in the right you know all the places so the real cost to wind is more like three times what the actual cost you were pay for it is so it's maybe nine cents a kilowatt hour instead of three which is what no cost if you're generating it all the time I'm sorry that's not I didn't say that right if you're buying wind energy you'll pay one-third as much for it because of the variability so the cost of generating it is only about three cents so the issue with wind is distribution and there's been some studies done if you had wide scale distribution and I'm talking about all the way from northern Africa and Morocco all the way up to northern Europe you had a good electric grid that connected those know you could get eighty percent of Europe's energy and Africa northern Africa's energy from winds with no oversubscription something's would be competitive with coal right now now are we gonna build that grid I don't know I doubt it's it's probably a good idea to do that and that's you know the grid stuff is amazingly antiquated there's no power electronics and it's no it's I think there's a lot of opportunity to improve grid functioning we're gonna need that as we bring these new kinds of energy online that have different kinds of variability now I want to end with this image and one other area of high leverage that I see is scientific publishing yeah we've been trying to help out with Google Scholar and Google Books and things like that and try to get more of scientific information into the real public use but every time you know Google search happens which is pretty often I'm pretty pains and the reason is that probably most of the work that you guys all have done is not represented in those searches right we don't have access to it or it's indexed recently you know I've been doing research for this talk I got a lot of results when I got to like I Triple E firewall or something like that and I you know I have plenty of money and I didn't buy the articles because it sucks a lot you know I went off and searched for free ones and so on and we got to make that process easier we gotta unlock the wealth of scientific knowledge and get it to everybody on the Internet and there's great proposals in those areas to you know do the time-lapse and all these kind of things I don't really care what we all do but we should do something if the current situation is not good no so in closing you know I want to talk about most of the kite ride to give you just a flavor of some of the examples I see where there's big opportunities and most of those things the same thing we do at Google is we try to get people working on these things and it's usually small teams right these are ten thousand person efforts right usually like a small core team of like 10 people is really what makes it happen and so it's not a big cost either you know you can have a really big impact it's really fun to be one of those ten people right and so I don't know anywhere there's a hundred more areas love to talk about of time but I will take questions then thank you we have two microphones in these two central aisles and I would suggest that people who want to ask questions line up behind the two microphones and we'll just alternate between them so the first question would be the gentleman here thank you so very much I've been following Google in fact I met you guys at a conference I think in 98 was interesting but with google.org do you have a procedure for submitting proposals do you have a mechanism so that I'm seriously serious so that when people have an idea about developing a technology somewhere in the world you might have a platform is I just kind of curious yes but I mean there's actually a procedure already in place yeah I think there is it's tough for us this is a really small team so honestly I've been trying to get them to focus mostly on hiring more people because you know it's like probably less than 20 people still so their ability to deal with the whole world is limited just to be honest let's take the microphone over here Google the company sponsor or give space to a lot of Google time for me to see a number of groups meet there yeah thank you for that but can you encourage other companies a lot of them are really tight about it I mean IBM who have been very nice thank you great good luck to you with all the projects with your perspective because those weren't all my projects Wow ones you're interested in with your perspective you have a very unique perspective worldwide what do you see is the most disruptive technology probably to come along over the say the next 10 20 years well I mean it's hard to predict I mean most of the kinds of things that I mentioned people get confused because they try to predict how long they'll take to happen so like how long will I take to happen the real answer is there's a 5% chance it'll happen every year and most of these things are like that it's mostly based on whether anybody's working it over here for mentioning how you can listen to encourage participation in science and so forth and I think that one thing that has not been mentioned and perhaps Google and other companies might get more involved is we come down in the school system and so forth but there's one thing that this conspicuously lacking in this country it is philosophy in science and education starting with grammar school I've been in number of countries where philosophy is an integral part of the curriculum such as in Mexico and I find out that there's an emergence of students with an awful lot more curiosity and willingness to participate in science and I find it there's a again in this country we really need to introduce that all across the curriculum in the schools if necessary by federal mandate that that is conspicuously absent and I would encourage Google to support that effort hi on YouTube and Google video there are a lot of silly video clips but there are also some serious clips like in google Tech Talk for example how do you see IP video evolving for serious purposes well one of the things actually I was thinking about talking about that I didn't was I always thought it'd be great to have a little box on the back of every classroom that you just push the button and your whatever you said will go on the internet and Stanford basically has this which is how I watch the lectures but they have like a whole studio and people behind the curtain ease and it's very expensive but you know presumably it could just automate that and have a button you push and I think you just be important to actually get all that stuff out there and I do think the value of all the instruction that goes on is very high and with technology we could take that and get it to everybody or easily thank you back to this time I was just wondering if you knew what the most looked up word was on Google well I can't talk about that how's three letters hi Larry I'm deaf I'm deaf myself and I use in my interpreter I want congratulation you see they're part of the YouTube one problem for that individual is there wasn't completely accessible the Google videos and the YouTube because an actor caption I see we have a captions for the others I think it's a great idea if you can put em be a closed captioned and the video Google beauty and YouTube and me that would be wonderful yes he's asking about captioning on videos youtube and stalling for do you plan to support this in the future I think it's very important area also just to be able to get next all the positive speech because there's a lot of research programs that go on that China an index speech automatically and also just have people convert the speech also and attacks so it can be indexed and so that people can see can see the taxes instead of just audio so I think it's a very important area thank you over here hi um you have moved over from being a science and engineering person to being a big business leader I'm actually a business magazine too much a little bit though and you also have an enormous amount of resources both your time and your energy and your money that you're focusing and I noticed with Google org you said something about how you're trying to you know decide what to do what to do with this money and make it use it efficiently so have you do you feel that there's a need for taking sort of scientific method and applying it to business and organizational decisions and evaluating projects and deciding how you're going to choose where you're gonna spend your resources oh my wish you know business defies a lot of scientific thinking because you don't get to do things twice usually so it's hard to know whether you did the right thing a lot of times we try to be as rigorous and sort of analytical as possible and I think that's us how with most good businesses do that over here so when you pipe to Google often they ask you these test questions to think how you think and there was one that I wanted to know what your response would be to so one of them I believe is what is the most beautiful mathematical equation and I just wanted to know your response to that I don't think I should give the answers obviously can I can I venture a guess Russell I don't think they would hire me okay well I thought of that question and my answer it probably would have been the x squared plus a constant iterated over the real and imaginary plane which is the Mandelbrot set itself yeah that sounds pretty good okay okay hi Mary I'm Bill Smith I'm a statistician I kind of like the equation infinity I've been doing research on statistical application of the knowledge multi-disciplinary and I've been picking out the numbers for 30 years I'm from the industrial town stanley under they made a movie about it and I've got four nanotechnologies I believe the solar tax credits cut off because I wasted energy to do contact lenses instead of glass sheet you save a lot of energy with film and I saw this material when you came up I came in tardy at the end here and they can do that with film and I spoke to these guys with a sickie Sun concentrate they were interested last night the speaker said you want to do multidisciplinary things and he said you can't clean the atmosphere very cheaply you want to do with exhaust pipe likes to house a lot of different people like the electric auto Association president and I finally keep coming up with a statistical information off of everybody and I keep sharing it with everybody it's amazing thing you want to do multidisciplinary things you want to have the numbers on things and then you can go down the road and it's a process of elimination for the new material for design you take your physics you get the chemistry you get the engineering materials and you come up with engineering you get the engineering solutions and you have a whole new industry I've got four nanotechnologies for these alternate technologies and I'm laughing at these people left and right we need to get the knowledge here that's where the jobs are gonna happen I'm doing military base conversion process I've got two more nanotechnologies for the brain and I'm chasing seven billionaire's so so far because the system can't cooperate cuz they're not but do you have our question all I've got is answers and all emails I'm Bill Smith I just had a meeting with my Mara three times they want to do up a new Institute here clean tech Institute thank you over here please hi I have sort of like a question challenge I have found a way to conserve heat and I thought I asked you willing to try what I do I lived for 30 years without heat in the house and the way I do it as I simply wear a down jacket and sleep in a down sleeping bag and it's amazing how much energy each of us can save if you don't turn on the heat I know it seems strange what you'd be willing to try it for one year come on give me a break it's not that bad I live in San Francisco you live in Palo Alto it's it's easy here it's you have a wave yeah well there's an alternative you could use as much Cayenne as I do too I keep her warm challenge I don't think I would be willing to do it in Maine for a year to show how easy it is it's actually relatively once you get into the okay we'll invite you to try Maine for a year and report back next year okay the over on the right place by the way if you built on your new cities with an extra pipe for just hot water from the existing power generation you could probably heat everything for free which they do in some like the town I grew up in Lansing Michigan I eat the whole downtown with the power plant through Steam well they have geothermal yup good my name is Charles gene from mr. Preston speech last night I've learned on or point to only not point two percent of the GDP in developed world ghosts contributed to help the less developed countries do you think as as that's cheap exact executive of such a big cooperation you should Google should use its wealth its resources and its its internet power to devote into helping the pause in the those nations oh absolutely but I think the the issue is not so much the money as the will and the sort of learned helplessness that people have I mean I think if somebody convinced everybody it was possible to solve all the problems in the world they'd be solved all right it's not and resources we got allocated and there's a ton of governments and people and everybody around the world want to help if they thought that was working so that's the trick is to get something people believe is going to work don't you think Google should intervene more with all the foreign governments and especially some projects that really work that work at scale and that people can put a lot of resources into and be excited about over here I suppose that a Google employee is the olders have five years five years they please but do you get some 50 years old what are you looking for people who are older than 50 we're definitely hiring people thank you over here please thanks so much for your talk I'm completely Pro technology improving the lives of everybody here and in the developing world but in the short term do you have any ideas about how the impact of that technology reducing jobs and manufacturing and service sectors and that possibly increasing income disparity how we can address that simultaneously in the short term and clearly the long term answer is more education but in the near term what can we do well I think there's an issue I mean for example if you're reducing manufacture of farming jobs which we've done almost to zero you know those jobs went away but it's great because we have food and we don't have to do anything so I think the issue there is if you're focused on jobs that's not the right metric I mean I think you'd be great for you know search stopping automatically I'm glad that I don't have to answer them myself to be a lot of work and I think you know those weren't jobs that ever existed either so I think or maybe a few of them did but I don't think we want to focus on jobs I think you want to focus on what our capabilities are as a species to be happening and how the things we need and there's a lot of people in the world they don't have all the things they need okay over here hi I really appreciate you talking I appreciate the fact you took a very broad view however you're you're running a company on a day to day basis and you have to deal with some realities and in particular how do you my question is how do you balance issues of safety and political context you know with various actions of Google's so we've noticed that recently for example on Google Earth the Naval Observatory in DC has been blanked out from the maps areas like the nuclear station outside of New York City has not been blanked out of maps how did you make these decisions well in general we have lots lots of issues - like this like there's something copyrighted as a standard I mean yeah you know unfortunately we don't have we don't have very many people so anywhere we can we try to get other people to do that work and usually there's a good way that's already established to do it so for example on the internet if you have a copyright violation and you can sort of go after the ISP and then they take it down there's a procedure or part of the DMCA and so on and actually none of that generally goes through us and the satellite data is similar so there's a system that the government's use with the people who are taking the pictures which isn't us and they negotiate over what happens in whatever data that ends up there we publish so in general we can't answer all policy issues there's tons of complex policy issues that are very legitimate we just try to get those make sure there's a good process established for governments and generally other people to deal with them that works pretty well over here please thank you I found your talk very inspiring especially because you had a very can-do attitude that like on climate change if we just want to solve it and we put people on it that is that's my question is there are a lot of people who have been working on solving the climate change problem from a technology perspective and Google has an amazing and just applying it without I wonder what people who work on climate change could learn from that and how they could get the technology out to the marketplace to solve the problem well I think there's a lot of interest in investment going on in energy which i think is very very good so I think we can solve the energy problem which month they will eventually solve the climate change problem I think in terms of the solving the climate change problem itself with the carbon that's already in the atmosphere and so on that's awfully much tougher issue over here good evening I have two questions the first ones concerning Google and the second ones are on your ideas on energy now the first one how much do you think Google is contributed to the abuse of the internet because I mean undoubtedly it's been a great help to all of us looking for information but on the other hand also those looking for rather nice pictures via Google Image Search or worse this is something we think about a lot is the question of society a kind of question do you want to have open access to as much information as possible or not you know including things that might be problematic the more extreme examples and bad images things that you know could hurt people or things like that can we've tried to step back a little bit and just say we're gonna whatever information is out there we're going to make available and you know there's governments and other people that restrict various kinds of things and we sort of just try to have that but that is somewhat a value we have is for open access yes and the second one concerning ideas on energy I've only got three questions first one did you come here on public transport second one view have solar energy panels on your home and third one did you put your computer on standby off standby when you left your home no income on public transit I think other we've Google's really great we have about 80 buses now we're running our own buses all around the Bay Area so we do actually run buses up here and so on we just did a big solar installation at Google I've been working on instead of trying to do it personally and which is much larger than I would do myself that's probably about 30% of our energies and having the campus is pretty substantial was really a question yeah but unfortunately all the Google servers are constant we haven't trying really hard actually to get out of the industry to agree to a standard power supply of 12 volts by four computers which would probably cut 10% of Energy's computers worldwide good much of what he talked about was about communication and grassroots support but if I were to Google for example you your name a lot of what I would find is people who are fundamentally against the publishing of information on the internet and making it available at all how would you respond to that sorry which people let's say Google Oh don't like us yeah I don't know it's an issue that people like controversy and things like that um part of that actually is we don't do necessarily good job of ranking those things that's partly a probably problem in how we do ranking because we probably are giving I mean I think there's actually this question I'm very interesting is how you get greater sort of understanding and will rigor applied to sites and people's ideas and so on and those can flow around the web link like links to but I think that's really I don't solve problems so you'll see a lot of various things yeah thanks I think my question may have been answered already but I think you used the example when you're preparing for your speech you were googling for images or information and you would hit up a firewall that would ask you to pay for an article and then you kind of went off and found the other information actually I didn't find the dollar well I guess that's the question it's that information is behind a firewall because there's a value to it someone really invented something they prepare that it's their property intellectually but this is the problem at Google brings us access to these things we know of it but we still have to acquire it somehow is it so I just wanted we have thoughts or if there's other things she's been thinking about how to make that other information legally available and and maybe in a more direct way that we have to do right now yeah it's really important point we've actually we just released Google Checkout which actually makes a lot easier to buy things and I think that'll be really useful for us it's not that I'm not willing to buy about information it's that it's too complicated to do it now a lot of people wouldn't be willing to buy it I don't know how you deal with developing countries and other things are like are important issues but I think you just kind of create less friction right thank you we take a let's take two or three more before people gunfire this is heaven open any question but I was just wondering what your thoughts were on politics and government and I don't mean about like the current administration or anything but like in theoretically government is is kind of inefficient and I was just wondering what you if there were any thoughts of the reasons behind that yes I don't know how amazed there aren't poor candidates and I think that's partly a function of the the what it's really like to be a candidate you know and I think that would be a relatively easy thing to fix maybe change our system so we get a lot more people involved okay last one so it was wonderful to hear you speak about the Grand Challenges in the world apart from the grand challenge of search and I was wondering what sorts of initiatives you have in the short term and long term to actually address global climate change within Google we're trying to do we use quite a bit of energy not compared to like you know a big Exxon or something but we use quite a bit of energy and we're trying to make sure that's renewable and carbon neutral and all those kinds of things most thing that's been a way for us to learn about things like Cleveland we bought some ocelots things like that I don't think we're completely happy with that experience and there's been a lot of kind of varying articles about it see other people are pointing out issues so I think I don't know that we have really great ideas about that it seems like the greatest leverage we can have is to try to get some really interesting people doing interesting stuff actually building things that could generate a lot of energy so the solar things I mentioned that we're and then things like that I'm pretty optimistic that a small team there could make a huge difference in the world in a short amount of time good when we are 10 minutes overtime so I want to thank Larry Page

Channel: Google TechTalks

Views: 7,938

Rating: 4.8620691 out of 5

Keywords: google, howto, aaas, 2007, annual, meeting

Id: 69Rri8Bpz0o

Length: 68min 20sec (4100 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 08 2007