Astro Teller

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“Almost Every Day In The Moonshot Factory Is Messy”

May 4, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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As I’ve mentioned before, Google does not want to be primarily a search giant in a decade. That would leave the company in a well-appointed grave. That’s why the X division–a bold attempt at a latter-day, privately held Bell Labs–is so critical, moonshots so meaningful. If the company hits on a few, it can reinvent itself on the fly.

Of course, what’s good for an individual corporation is much more of a mixed blessing for a society. Pretty much all of these endeavors have a surveillance aspect, can only be commodified by knowing where we are, what we’re doing and what we’re thinking. They’re aimed at moving us all inside the Plex.

In a Backchannel piece, Astro Teller, X Director and true believer, culls the cutting-room-floor material from his recent TED Talk to further discuss the creative process. It’s a mix of sound advice and Silicon Valley self-mythologizing. The opening:

Almost every day in the moonshot factory is messy. Even when you’re sure you’re learning lots of valuable things during weeks or months of frustration, everyone worries, “What happens if I fail? Will people laugh at me? Will I get fired?” At the end of the day, we all have to pay the bills and want the people around us to think highly of us. So it’s human nature to gravitate toward the paths that feel psychologically safe.

That’s why, if you want your team to be audacious, you have to make being audacious the path of least resistance. People have to feel safe even as they make mistakes or fail altogether — which means we, as managers and leaders, have to make it easy and rewarding to take risks and run enthusiastically at really hard things. Here are a few things we’ve tried at X so our emotional environment keeps us brave enough to say and act on things that have a very good chance of being wrong — and just might be crazy enough to be brilliant.•

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“The Cars Performed Flawlessly. The People Did Not.”

June 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Google’s all-or-nothing approach to driverless cars was apparently brought about because road tests proved the computer-human tandem incompatible. It was a punch to the gut of Google X at the time, but it forced the emergence of a fully autonomous vehicle. From Alistair Barr at the Wall Street Journal:

Google’s self-driving car project, one of the first to emerge from Google X, also faced major challenges, [Astro] Teller said.

In the fall of 2012, the team thought it had finished because it had built a car capable of driving itself safely on highways. Google gave some of the vehicles to other Google employees to use to commute to and from work and made them promise to continue paying attention to the road, Teller said.

“The cars performed flawlessly. The people did not,” he added. While not providing details, Teller said the employees paid less attention because they assumed the car would take care of any incidents.

“It was not pretty. We stopped doing it. We realized humans cannot be a backup system for the computer,” Teller said.

The team had to re-design a new vehicle capable to driving itself all the way from point A to point B with no help from a human driver. Teller said this was an “existential” blow to the team at the time.•

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“It Isn’t A Car Anyone Would Ever Want To Drive”

March 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Two excerpts follow about driverless cars. The first is swooning review of a Mercedes robocar from Alex Davies of Wired, the second, from Google X’s Astro Teller at Backchannel, examines the more mundane problems of making autonomous a reality.

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From Davies:

There will come a time, within a few decades, when people simply will not drive anymore. This is a hard truth for automakers like Mercedes-Benz and Audi to acknowledge, given the time and money they spend portraying their cars as fun to drive. So they serve every shot of “Your car will drive itself!” with a chaser of “But you can always drive your car if you want to!” This will make sense as the transition to autonomous cars begins: You’ll take the wheel of your SL-Class when driving through the winding hills, it’ll take over on your boring commute.

But the day is coming when we won’t even do that. That explains why the steering wheel in the F 015 is largely vestigal.

I didn’t get behind the wheel of the F 015, and I had no desire to: It isn’t a car anyone would ever want to drive. For one thing, it’s huge. No amount of torque from the electric motors Mercedes happened to slap into this thing will ever make it an exhilarating performer. It’s also somewhat cumbersome; that epic wheelbase does nothing for its agility (Hutzenlaub says Mercedes would consider giving the car four-wheel steering if it ever considered production.)

But all of that is moot. As I nestled deeper into the leather seats, the idea of leaving the touch screens alone and taking the wheel seemed genuinely stupid. After all, you don’t leave first class to sit in the cockpit.

The F 015 one of the most thrilling cars I’ve ever seen. And I don’t want to drive it.•

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From Teller:

One of our projects is focused on building a fully self-driving car. If the technology could be made so that a car could drive all the places a person can drive with greater safety than when people drive in those same places, there are over a million lives a year that could be saved worldwide. Plus there’s over a trillion dollars of wasted time per year we could collectively get back if we didn’t have to pay attention while the car took us from one place to another.

When we started, we couldn’t make a list of the 10,000 things we’d have to do to make a car drive itself. We knew the top 100 things, of course. But pretty good, pretty safe, most of the time isn’t good enough. We had to go out and just find a way to learn what should be on that list of 10,000 things. We had to see what all of the unusual real world situations our cars would face were. There is a real sense in which the making of that list, the gathering of that data, is fully half of what is hard about solving the self driving car problem.

A few months ago, for example, our self-driving car encountered an unusual sight in the middle of a suburban side street. It was a woman in an electric wheelchair wielding a broom and working to shoo a duck out of the middle of the road. You can see in this picture what our car could see. I’m happy to say, by the way that while this was a surprising moment for the safety drivers in the car and for the car itself I imagine, the car did the right thing. It came autonomously to a stop, waited until the woman had shoo’d the duck off the road and left the street herself and then the car moved down the street again. That definitely wasn’t on any list of things we thought we’d have to teach a car to handle! But now, when we produce a new version of our software, before that software ends up on our actual cars, it has to prove itself in tens of thousands of situations just like this in our simulator, but using real world data. We show the new software moments like this and say “and what would you do now?” Then, if the software fails to make a good choice, we can fail in simulation rather than in the physical world. In this way, what one car learns or is challenged by in the real world can be transferred to all the other cars and to all future versions of the software we’ll make so we only have to learn each lesson once and every rider we have forever after can get the benefit from that one learning moment.•

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“I Met An Idiosyncratic Troupe Of Former Park Rangers, Sculptors, Philosophers, And Machinists”

April 15, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jon Gertner, who wrote an excellent book about Bell Labs, has an article at Fast Company about Google X, the lab that is trying to be its creative descendant, though the search giant’s “moonshot” wing is even further afield, more an amorphous thing than something that is solid state. An excerpt:

“X does not employ your typical Silicon Valley types. Google already has a large lab division, Google Research, that is devoted mainly to computer science and Internet technologies. The distinction is sometimes framed this way: Google Research is mostly bits; Google X is mostly atoms. In other words, X is tasked with making actual objects that interact with the physical world, which to a certain extent gives logical coherence to the four main projects that have so far emerged from X: driverless cars, Google Glass, high-­altitude Wi-Fi balloons, and glucose-monitoring contact lenses. Mostly, X seeks out people who want to build stuff, and who won’t get easily daunted. Inside the lab, now more than 250 ­employees strong, I met an idiosyncratic troupe of former park rangers, sculptors, philosophers, and machinists; one X scientist has won two Academy Awards for special effects. [Astro] Teller himself has written a novel, worked in finance, and earned a PhD in artificial intelligence. One recent hire spent five years of his evenings and weekends building a helicopter in his garage. It actually works, and he flew it regularly, which seems insane to me. But his technology skills alone did not get him the job. The helicopter did. ‘The classic definition of an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing,’ says DeVaul. ‘And people like that can be extremely useful in a very focused way. But these are really not X people. What we want, in a sense, are people who know less and less about more and more.’

If there’s a master plan behind X, it’s that a frictional arrangement of ragtag intellects is the best hope for creating products that can solve the world’s most intractable issues. Yet Google X, as Teller describes it, is an experiment in itself–an effort to reconfigure the process by which a corporate lab functions, in this case by taking incredible risks across a wide variety of technological domains, and by not hesitating to stray far from its parent company’s business. We don’t yet know if this will prove to be genius or folly. There’s actually no historical model, no ­precedent, for what these people are doing.”

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“Most Of The Firm’s Wildest Ideas Are Dreamed Up At Google X”

September 20, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Well, Time‘s cover story, Can Google Solve Death?, overpromises just a little, doesn’t it? I mean, Google hasn’t even been able to solve social media. The article doesn’t provide much insight into its ostensible premise, that with the launch of Calico, a life-extension outfit, Google aims to, yes, defeat mortality, through information-rich analysis. But the piece by Harry McCracken and Lev Grossman works because of its shadow premise.

The real story, not necessarily a new one but well-stated here, is that Google is a deeply strange company–which is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s not like Microsoft, which rode its primary product (software) to great wealth, occasionally dabbling (unsuccessfully) in sectors it had already lost (Slate for online content, Bing for search, Zune for digital-music players). Facebook seems to be much more like Microsoft in its mission purity, whereas Google wants to cut a broader path.

No, the template for the search giant is the golden age of Bell Labs. Of course, Google hasn’t had nearly the success yet that AT&T’s R&D lab did. But it only has to hit in a couple of areas (e.g., driverless-car software leading a fleet of autonomous taxis) to begin to diversify itself into a seemingly endless future. Ultimately, it’s own life is the one Google is really trying to extend. 

From the article (which is paywalled):

“Most of the firm’s wildest ideas are dreamed up at Google X, which functions something like Google’s fantastical subconscious. It’s a secretive research arm headquartered a three-minute ride from the main Googleplex on one of the company’s 1,000-plus brightly colored bikes. While Page tends to the entire business as CEO, Brin now devotes much of his attention to X, which he runs in partnership with scientist and entrepreneur Astro Teller. Teller’s title–just to underline the operation’s stratospheric aspirations–is ‘Captain of Moonshots.’ (Teller changed his name from Eric to Astro, a reference to the AstroTurf-like buzz cut he sported in high school.) Except for his long hair, beard and mustache, he’s a dead ringer for his paternal grandfather, physicist Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb.

According to Teller, Google X’s moon shots have three things in common: a significant problem for the world that needs solving, a potential solution and the possibility of breakthrough technology making all the difference. (Making money comes later.) Even a proposed project that meets all these criteria probably won’t make the cut. ‘Sergey and I being pretty excited about it is a necessary but not sufficient condition,’ Teller explains. ‘Depending on what it is, it might require consulting experts, it might require building prototypes, sometimes even forming a temporary team to see where it goes and then saying to the team, ‘It is your goal to kill this idea as fast as possible.’’

Four big Google X efforts are public knowledge. There’s Google Glass, the augmented-reality spectacles that pack a camera and a tiny Web-connected screen you can peek at out of the corner of your right eye and control with your voice and gestures. Makani Power–a startup that the company invested in and then bought outright in May–puts energy-generating wind turbines on flying wings that are tethered to the ground but circle 1,000 ft. in the air. Project Loon aims to deliver Internet access to remote areas of the planet by beaming it wirelessly from 39-ft.-tall helium balloons hovering 12 miles in the sky. Though Calico is a Google X–style long shot, it will be a separate entity from Teller’s shop.

But if you had to pick a Google X moon shot with the most plausible chance of permanently reshaping the way we live, it would be the self-driving automobiles.”

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