John Holdren: Good evening, I'm John Holdren, the President of the AAAS and it is my great pleasure to be able to introduce Larry Page. Larry was Google's founding chief executive officer. 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 Page. His love of computers began at age six. At one point when he was in college he built an inkjet printer out of Lego bricks. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering...I think maybe his thesis was that Lego printer.
While he was in the PhD 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 six o'clock last night when I was collecting pictures of my mentors to use in my Presidential address. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2004, I suspect one of the youngest people ever to have achieved that particular honour. Larry Page.
Larry Page: You really want to have people in power who understand things...that's the basic thing, right? It was actually amazing to me...Google is in the technology industry and at some point we decided we should hire a CEO, and we embarked on a long search and for actually more than a year searched for somebody. We had some basic criteria, like we wanted them to understand computer science because we figured that's what we do, we program and produce software and that's the main thing that we do. That turned out to be very, very difficult. We probably hired one of the only guys who had a PhD in computer science, that was Eric Schmidt.
Just think, if you're a CEO, a high tech executive, and you're the only one who meets the qualifications, it's great, right? So I'm encouraging all of you to go out and do that. It's amazing how few people in positions of power have a deep technical or scientific background. I have a theory about this which is it basically has to do with meetings. We try actually very hard to get our engineers to come to meetings at Google and they never do, they just refuse, they just sort of run screaming back to their computer. Actually it's true for me to some extent too, I really don't like going to meetings, but I've fought it and now I've overcome that issue and I can do that and that's a very important skill to have.
But in any case, I think it's really important to take positions of power and help the world. The other nice thing about this is that science funding, depending on how you count, in the US is maybe 1% or 2% of GDP which is pretty small compared to other things, and you imagine if that's really causing all of the economic growth, maybe if that was 10% maybe you'd have ten times the growth, or maybe you'd have even more because it's really an exponential kind of thing. So that would have a really big impact. So I would encourage you all to control funding at the highest levels rather funding for all the scraps.
I think the other thing to keep in mind is really few people try to do groundbreaking things, and we mentioned the X PRIZE in the introduction...I was amazed, I met the X PRIZE guys and they've been working for ten years or something like that to get people interested in space. They finally scrounged up some money and they got the prize established and they got a whole bunch of teams to compete on it, and once they did all this and they got their successful flights, they had billions of media impressions and huge amounts of interest and there's people now working on commercial space flight. The main thing that happened was there was one guy who spent ten years convincing everybody that it was possible, and that was the hard part.
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 is you start with the media. That's really where most people are paying attention. I was just going to use the example of CSI. How many people have watched CSI? Wow, that's a surprisingly low number. You should watch it, it's a pretty good show. But I think probably we'll have more crime scene investigators than we'll ever need because of that show. It wouldn't surprise me. It's amazing the things that the media can really have an impact on.
The other good example is...I mean, who would have thought a former Presidential candidate would start a TV station which is based right here in San Francisco, this is Al Gore's Current TV. He's really trying to make a difference in that space and get higher-class things into the media. Let me just switch and talk about changing the world. When I was about 12 I decided I wanted to be an inventor, and somebody gave me an autobiography of Tesla. He was this great inventor, invented electric power and all sorts of things. I read this autobiography and I just about cried at the end because he was basically a failure; he couldn't fund his research, many other great things he invented, maybe people don't even know what they are today, and he was always struggling to commercialise this stuff and really get it out to the world.
I said, I don't want to be like Tesla, I want to have an easy time and make a real impact. I think for that you do need some integration with business and engineering and the other areas as scientists. One of those is I think science and engineering, I don't really separate them because I feel that if 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. I think it's really important to get entrepreneurship better involved in universities, and I was lucky enough to spend time at Stanford which is probably the best example.
The thing that I really benefited from at Stanford was that whole culture of people who are very, very smart, who've had successful companies, who've had management positions, who've been great scientists who've been dropouts from Stanford and so on, which most of the companies represented there...those people, a lot of them have gone back to Stanford or they fund research there or they fund interesting projects, and that is an amazing cycle and it's really what makes the valley here great. I think a lot of economic scientists really miss that.
Education: Primary education is a clear problem in science, and I have a radical proposal; I think universities should take it over. I'm not exactly sure how to do that but I just feel that universities are pretty good and secondary schools aren't, so if I was in charge that's what I would do. Okay, let's get to some fun parts, 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, by doing things that matter a lot. One, I think the most obvious one, is transportation.
Transportation is a huge use of people's time, of the energy in the world, and we basically haven't had any new systems since 100 years ago. The only computer that's used in transportation is an elevator. It's the only form of transportation that I've seen that really uses computers; you can push a button and it takes you there, right? Planes can do that but we don't allow them to do that, we still have pilots. Most planes can land themselves now, the big ones.
I was lucky enough to be at the DARPA Grand Challenge where the Stanford cart won by driving autonomously all day through the desert and up and down mountains and things like that, which people thought would never be possible. It won $10million or something like that. The guys who do this, 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. I'm pretty sure if computers were driving, even Stanley, that number would be a lot lower and it's not that far away. I know also there are probably only 100 people in the world that are working on that. That's a tremendous opportunity.
If you've ever spent any time in the developing world you know the roads are really a disaster. Your average speed is probably 10 or 15 miles an hour and it's a big issue. We are of course used to our roads here but they actually take a lot of resources to make and maintain. That plane right there which is not particularly high technology can go faster than your car, it probably goes about 90 miles an hour, and it also goes point to point with no road, and it uses actually less fuel than your car does per mile. So I'm not so sure that we should be building roads. 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 completely safe, but I don't think there's anybody working on that, or very few people.
One of my favourite things is artificial intelligence but it has gotten a very bad rap...but my prediction is that when AI happens it's going to be a lot of computation and not so much clever algorithms but just a lot of computation. My theory is that if you look at your programming, your DNA, it's about 600 megabytes compressed, so it's smaller than any modern operating system, smaller than Linux or Windows or anything like that, your whole operating system, that includes booting up your brain, by definition. 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 on a large scale and so on, and in fact, to make search better, to do the perfect job of search you could ask any query and it would give you the perfect answer and that would be artificial intelligence based on everything being on the web, which is a pretty close approximation. We're lucky enough to be working incrementally closer to that, but again, very, very few people are working on this, and I don't think it's as far off as people think.
I'll give you another quick example; Google Books. We actually wanted to digitise Stanford's library and there's actually a digital library project there and we tried to convince people and they just didn't think it was really possible or made sense, and actually we spent probably five years trying to convince people that it was possible and a good idea. Once we convinced maybe two or three crazy people, it's basically happening. We just made a one million...we're going to digitise another million books in Princeton and it's sort of routine now which is a great thing, but it shows you how hard it is to get people going on things that they think maybe aren't that possible.
The US 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 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. That's especially in the Middle East, in Africa, and there are a lot of things to be done. There's issues of clean water, there's medicine, health- which there's been more progress being made on recently which is great to see some of our pharmaceuticals being used and that's certainly going to cause a lot of goodwill in the world and there's communications which has actually had a big impact in a lot of these places.
I was just in rural Ghana and half the people there had cell phones, which is pretty amazing as it's not that prosperous a place. But it's important to have communications, and it's pretty easy to do these days. And of course poverty. I don't know what all the answers are to all these things but I do know that we've been trying to do this through google.org and we were lucky enough when we went public we put about 1% of our resources into google.org; 1% of our stock and 1% of our time. There's now more than a billion dollars in there to be used. We realised that that's really a small amount compared to what gets spent already, and it's also not clear where you spend it. You also need good projects and there are very few people doing these things. So, great, great opportunities are there to make new friends and to have a huge impact.
I tried to give you just a flavour of some of the examples I see where there's big opportunities, and so there's a hundred more areas that I'd love to talk about but I don't have time. I will take questions now. Thank you.
Audience member: I was just wondering if you knew what the most looked-up word was on Google?
Larry Page: Oh I can't talk about that. It has three letters.
Audience member: Hi, I have sort of like a question challenge. I have found a way to conserve heat and I thought I'd ask you if you were willing to try what I do. I've lived for 30 years without heat in the house, and the way I do it is 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. Would you be willing to try it for one year? It's not that bad. I live in San Francisco, you live in Palo Alto, it's easy here.
Larry Page: Do you have a wife?
Audience member: Yeah.
Robyn Williams: Not the most tactful response perhaps, but he is an engineer. Larry Page, co-founder of Google, worth personally many billions of dollars.
Excerpts from Google chief Larry Page's address at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Francisco February 2007. Larry Page urges for public engagement of science ideas through the media. He presents his ideas for getting people motivated about science and technology. He says we need to think about a whole new transport system. He says we need to work harder at making friends in the world, and cheap telecommunications makes this easier.