Sergey Brin

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“We’re Looking For Wholesale Reinvention Of This Crazy, Perverse Food System”

August 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In vitro foods are happening now and will become a staple of our diets in the future, as a growing global population and environmental concerns demand it. Meat, of course, is the hardest to approximate, but that will also happen. Considering the processed crap we eat now, the so-called Frankenfoods may be significantly healthier. From Katie Murphy at the New York Times:

“Whether for moral reasons or because of a Jobsian belief in the superiority of their vision, high-tech food entrepreneurs are focusing primarily on providing alternatives to animal protein. The demand is certainly there. Worldwide consumption of pork, beef, poultry and other livestock products is expected to double by 2020. Animal protein is also the most vulnerable and resource-intensive part of the food supply. In addition to livestock production’s immense use of land and water, runoff pollution and antibiotic abuse, it is responsible for 14.5 percent of greenhouse gases, according to the United Nations.

Venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Closed Loop Capital, Khosla Ventures and Collaborative Fund have poured money into Food 2.0 projects. Backing has also come from a hit parade of tech-world notables including Sergey Brin of Google, Biz Stone of Twitter, Peter Thiel of PayPal and Bill Gates of Microsoft, as well as Li Ka-shing, Asia’s wealthiest man, who bought early stakes in Facebook and Spotify.

‘We’re looking for wholesale reinvention of this crazy, perverse food system that makes people do the wrong thing,’ said Josh Tetrick, the vegan chief executive of San Francisco-based Hampton Creek. His company has created an egg substitute using protein extracted from the Canadian yellow pea, incorporating it into Just Scramble, Just Mayo and Just Cookie Dough, which are starting to find their way onto grocery store shelves nationwide.”

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“Only A Few Of Them Need To Pay Off”

July 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In one passage of Vinod Khosla’s interview last week with Google guys Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the pair comment on the company’s future–your future!–when you’ll eventually have the implant. Search-engine earnings are a lot like oil money in Dubai: Eventually the generous profits dry up, so Page and Brin seek to build a diverse company unreliant on any one sector. If just intelligent machines or driverless-car software or a couple other “moonshots” pan out–robot butlers, anyone?–the Google nation-state won’t have to fret over its bottom line. What those things (robotics in particular) do to your bottom line, however, is another matter, since those complexities seem beyond the remedies of technologists or the will of politicians. An excerpt:

“Vinod Khosla:

I’d love both of you to comment a little bit on where Google is. What are the couple of things that become really, really critical for Google to do in the next five to 15 years? What areas are going to be critical?

Sergey Brin: 

I think if there was a couple of areas that were critical, then that would be too vulnerable a spot to be in, in a way. There are many, many opportunities to broadly use technology to impact the world, and to have a successful business. We try to invest, at least, in the places where we see a good fit to our company. But that could be many, many bets, and only a few of them need to pay off. From my perspective – running Google X – that’s my job, is to invest in a number of opportunities, each one of which may be a big bet. But I hope– well, you have a portfolio too. But I hope, across that portfolio, some of them pay off. Some of them are connected to our existing business and some, not so much. If you look at the self-driving cars, for example, I hope that that could really transform transportation around the world, and reduce the need for individual car ownership, the need for parking, road congestion and so forth. If that was successful in its own right, we would be super happy. It’s obviously still a big bet. It’s got many technical and policy risks. But if you are willing to make a number of bets like that, you’ve got to hope that some of them will pay off.

Vinod Khosla:

Larry, any particular areas you think are critical to Google’s success the next few years? Areas you don’t want to screw up?

Larry Page: 

I think we’re pretty excited about Android obviously. I think that we have our traditional businesses obviously, search and things like that. I think one of the things people have been confused about– people are like, ‘What is Google? Why are you guys coherent?’ And it’s really interesting when you look at search. It’s really trying to understand everything in the world and make sense of it, organize it for people. We said, ‘Well, We’re doing that. A lot of queries are actually about places, so we need to understand places.’ Then we said, ‘A lot of the queries are about content we can’t find. We did books, and so on.’ So, we’ve been gradually expanding that. If you look at things like Google Now also– well, maybe you don’t want to ask a question. Maybe you want to just have it answered for you before you ask it. That would be better. Originally, the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button, that was supposed to be– you should be able to skip the search results, and go directly to the answer. Unfortunately, it didn’t work that well. It was kind of an obtuse naming of the feature, but that was the same kind of idea. We feel like right now, computers are still pretty bad. You’re just messing around. You’re scrolling on your touchscreen phone, and trying to find stuff. You’re in a car. It’s bouncy, and you can’t– it doesn’t really work. I think the actual amount of knowledge you get out of your computer versus the amount of time you spend with it is still pretty bad. So I think our job is to solve that, and most of the things we’re doing make sense in that context.

Vinod Khosla: 

Along those lines, one of the areas I know you’ve both been very interested in is machine learning and AI, as it’s been called in the past. In the past, it’s never quite reached its potential or speculated potential. How far do you think it is as a technology, and how much of a role do you think it plays going forward?

Sergey Brin:

Look, this is our latest model, right here [gestures at Larry]. See, not perfect yet. But doing pretty well. In the machine learning realm, we have several kinds of efforts going on. There’s, for example, the brain project, which is really machine learning focused. It takes input, such as vision. In fact, we’ve been using it for the self-driving cars. It’s been helpful there. It’s been helpful for a number of Google services. And then, there’s more general intelligence, like the DeepMind acquisition that – in theory – we hope will one day be fully reasoning AI. Obviously, computer scientists have been promising that for decades and not at all delivered. So I think it would be foolish of us to make prognoses about that. But we do have lots of proof points that one can create intelligent things in the world because– all of us around. Therefore, you should presume that someday, we will be able to make machines that can reason, think and do things better than we can.”

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“You Can’t Drive It Even If You Want To”

May 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve posted before about Google pushing the near-term limits of what Elon Musk thinks is possible with autonomous vehicles. We’ll see how that turns out, but here’s a description the Verge’s David Pierce of Google’s new steering wheel-less autonomous taxi prototype which will definitely be all over the media and perhaps all over city streets:

“Speaking about self-driving cars last September, Elon Musk preached caution. The man who wants to send us all to space and shuttle us between cities at outrageous speeds told the FT that ‘my opinion is it’s a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.’

Somewhere deep inside the secret labs at Google X, Sergey Brin must have read that and smiled. And then climbed into his tiny car — the one with a strange smiley face for a front and a noticeably missing steering wheel — and with a single button press instructed his car to drive him wherever billionaires go to cackle at the short-sightedness of other billionaires.

On Tuesday night, onstage at the Code Conference in California, Brin revealed an entirely new take on a self-driving car, one decidedly more ambitious than anything we’ve seen before. Google’s as-yet-unnamed car isn’t a modified Lexus. It doesn’t just park itself. It’s an entirely autonomous vehicle, with no need for steering wheels or gas pedals or human intervention of any kind. You can’t drive it even if you want to.

The Google Car is fully electric, big enough for two passengers. It’ll only go 25 miles per hour. Your involvement with the car consists of four things: get in, put on your seatbelt, press the Start button, and wait.”

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“Andreessen Is Sanguine About The Future Of Journalism”

May 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Technological positivist Marc Andreessen was Russ Roberts’ guest on a really good installment of the EconTalk podcast. The Netscape founder and venture capitalist sees the world as moving in the right direction in the macro, perhaps giving short shrift to those sinking in the short-term and mid-term turmoil that attends transformation. Notes on myriad discussion topics.

  • Google. Andreessen details how one of the most powerful companies on Earth had plenty of luck on its way to market dominance and its position as a latter-day Bell Labs. The search giant could have collapsed early on or been purchased, with Larry Page and Sergey Brin winding up as, say, Yahoo! middle managers. (“A fate worse than death,” as the host cleverly sums it up.) The guest recalls a fellow venture capital player calling the chief Google guys the “two most arrogant founders” he’d ever met.
  • Jobs lost to automation. The guest believes that with the delivery of smartphones into the hands of (eventually) seven billion people, that we’re at the tipping point of an economic boom and great job creation. He doesn’t qualify his remarks by saying that we’re in for rough times in the short run with jobs because of robotics. Andreesen also doesn’t address the possibility that we could have both an economic boom and a jobs shortfall.
  • Bitcoin. He’s over the moon for the crypto-currency company, saying it’s as revolutionary as the personal computer or the Internet. That seems like way too much hyperbole.
  • MOOCs. Andreesen points out that good universities will never be able to expand to meet a growing global population, so online courses will be essential if we’re to avoid a disastrous educational collapse.
  • Political upheavals. The one cloud the Netscape founder sees on the horizon is a barrage of political upheavals that will destabilize sections of the globe at times.
  • Journalism. Andreessen is sanguine about the future of journalism, believing that companies will adjust to post-monopolistic competition. He points out formerly profitable things about newspapers (classified ads, sports scores, movie times, etc.) that have been cannibalized by the Internet without guessing what will replace them for those faltering companies. If his argument was that nothing need replace them and these erstwhile powerful news corporations were no longer necessary since news distribution is now diffuse, I think that would probably be a stronger argument than suggesting that all but a few such companies are salvageable.•

 

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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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“I’d Probably Try My Own Meat. I Don’t See Why Not.”

August 14, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Because meat doesn’t just rain down from the heavens, the first lab-made meat was taste-tested in London recently, the burger made possible thanks to a generous donation from Google’s Sergey Brin. Isha Datar, the director of a cultured-meat research group called New Harvest, was present at the meal. She just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

_______________________

 Question: 

Could you make different flavors of meat?

Isha Datar:

In theory, yes, any muscle cell type could be cultured.

_______________________

Question: 

Hello, I read an article in The Week yesterday about your impressive achievement. However it cited a few critics who participated in your taste test, and said that your product did not cook well because of its lack of fat. They (harshly) described it as grey and a little gross, if my memory serves. They also cited its lack of iron, do you have any comments on these criticisms, or plans to address them before your product hits the markets? 

Isha Datar: 

I’d like to point out first the this product is proof of concept. It’s to show that it is physically possible to culture a hamburger. It’s not practical at all right now. We need more funds to get there. There is nothing close to reaching the market just yet.Fat is something that can also be cultured and added, as is blood (where the iron could come from). This will certainly be looked at in the time to come.

The meat wasn’t really grey, because colour was enhanced with beet and saffron. But isn’t regular hamburger meat grey after cooked?

_______________________

Question:

How much time will it take for the meat to be available at the local supermarket? and will it be cheap?

Isha Datar: 

It will not start out cheap, just because of how expensive it will be. Think about how the computer trickled down into society. Highly exclusive and expensive and impractical… down to a huge proportion of the population having one in your pocket.

Not sure when everyone will have a burger in their pocket. Haha.

This first burger was $300K.. the next probably in the $10K range.. slowly moving down. The first tastings will be exclusive and expensive, slowly becoming more mainstream. Just cause technology moves that way.

_______________________

Question:

What do you say to those who, after research and understanding, still don’t want it? Do you foresee a future where this is the only type of meat available?

Isha Datar:

That’s fine if they don’t want it. But the standard price of meat can only increase with time. So they should keep that in mind.

And if they’re veg*n then no problem!

I think meat just needs to be diversified. For instance, beef is supposed to be raised on pasture that is totally unfit for farming. Hilly, rocky, steep, whatever. The problem is most beef is not produced this way. Beef is usually raised on food humans could eat (soy, corn) rather than food humans can’t eat (grass).

I personally have to problem with traditional farming. It’s just that that’s not the norm. 

There should be many types of meats, and various price levels.

_______________________

Question:

As I understand, you use bovine serum (or another similar animal product) in the media for the cultured meat. Have y’all been making steps towards using media that is 100% non-animal sources? Or is that further down the road? This would be crucial for vegetarians. 

Isha Datar: 

It is a goal to make the serum animal-free. Research is being done on culturing mammalian cells in algae-based and mushroom-based media. But SO MUCH MORE research needs to be done in this area.It’s something that hasn’t been pushed for in the medical community, which is why the research is lagging big time.

_______________________

Question:

Since you stated that the process could be used on any animal, I suppose it’s technically possible to grow human meat. Would you ever consider it or do you think society wouldn’t be ready for the ethical debate? Would you eat your own meat? 

Isha Datar:

Yes, it is technically possible. In fact it might be easier since we have so much more familiarity with human cells than the cell lines of agricultural animals.

I’d probably try my own meat. I don’t see why not.

As for society… I never know what it wants but it’s not a bad thought-experiment to engage in.•

••••••••••

Mmmm…

 

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“Our Assumptions About What Machines Can And Cannot Do Are Urgently In Need Of Updating”

September 30, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Imagine fleets of driverless cars bringing groceries to your door or automatic taxicabs shuttling you to and fro. Human ownership and operation of vehicles won’t die quickly, but more and more services will be handled by people-less vehicles. John Naughton’s new Guardian piece addresses the job-killing advent of the driverless cars, though in the long run the invention will create a healthier, wealthier lifestyle:

“At the ceremony in Mountain View, Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin,announced the company’s intention to bring autonomous vehicles to the market in five years. In a pre-emptive attack on critics, he pointed out that autonomous vehicles would be significantly safer than human-controlled ones. That seems plausible to me: 40,000 people are killed every year in road accidents in the US and many, if not most, of those are caused by human error. ‘This has the power to change lives,’ Brin said. ‘Too many people are underserved by the current transport system. They are blind, or too young to drive, or too old, or intoxicated.’ He also argued that manual operation of cars was inefficient: autonomous vehicles could make better use of the road and reduce the size of car parks by fitting into smaller areas than humans could get them into.

Ignore the evangelism for a moment and think about what Google has achieved. Its engineers have demonstrated that with smart software and an array of sensors, a machine can perform a task of sophistication and complexity most of us assumed would always require the capabilities of humans. And that means our assumptions about what machines can and cannot do are urgently in need of updating.”

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“Eventually You’ll Have The Implant”

August 1, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Steven Levy’s new book about Google, In the Plex, comes this conversation between company co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin:

“It will be included in people’s brains,” said Page. “When you think about something and don’t really know much about it, you will automatically get information.”

“That’s true,” said Brin. ‘Ultimately I view Google as a way to augment your brain with the knowledge of the world. Right now you go into your computer and type a phrase, but you can imagine that it could be easier in the future, that you can have just devices you talk into, or you can have computers that pay attention to what’s going on around them.”

Page said, “Eventually you’ll have the implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.” (Thanks NYRB.)•

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“My Aspiration For [Larry Page] Is That He Becomes One Of The Greatest Inventors-Entrepreneurs In History, In The Realm Of The Thomas Edisons Of The World.’

March 20, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Google’s ambition knows few bounds. A note about Google’s goals from a new Fast Company article at the moment when Larry Page assumes leadership of the company:

“Google is not always easily categorized. You can’t shorthand it the way you can with, say, Apple (a consumer electronics company) or Microsoft (a software company). While minimizing the world-changing visions of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates seems unwise, making computers a utility and transforming their power into desirable objects cannot compare with the ambitions of Google’s founders. Page and Brin’s stated mission has been to catalog and analyze all of the world’s information, and their larger, unstated aim is to reform all of the globe’s inefficiencies. In addition to translation and speech recognition, the founders are obsessed with image recognition (Google Goggles), advanced energy solutions (Google Energy), and robotics (check out its self-driving car).

Page and Brin’s big bets don’t always work. Google has had to back off reinventing TV-, radio-, and print-advertising sales; its book-digitization project has become a protracted mess; and its initiatives to make wireless networks more open and to change the way cell-phone carriers sell their plans have failed.

Focus on the misses, though, and you risk overlooking its remarkable successes. Google persists in reforming modern communications networks. Google Voice has taken off. Indeed, in 10 years, we might look back on this moment in Google’s history with surprise. While tech wags slagged Google for losing to Facebook, almost none of us saw it turning into the world’s largest phone company.

That’s what’s thrilling about Page taking the helm at Google right now. You get the sense that under his leadership, Google could try its hand at anything. More than anything else during my interviews with people who know Page, one comment stands out: ‘I don’t care what you put in the article,’ says David Lawee, Google’s head of acquisitions. ‘To me, this is the real story: Larry is a truly awesome inventor-entrepreneur. My aspiration for him is that he becomes one of the greatest inventors-entrepreneurs in history, in the realm of the Thomas Edisons of the world.'”

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