Where’s Google going next?

Onstage at TED2014, Charlie Rose interviews Google CEO Larry Page about his far-off vision for the company. It includes aerial bikeways and internet balloons … and then it gets even more interesting, as Page talks through the company’s recent acquisition of Deep Mind, an AI that is learning some surprising things.

Charlie Rose: So Larry sent me an email

and he basically said,

we've got to make sure that
we don't seem like we're

a couple of middle-aged boring men.

I said, I'm flattered by that --

(Laughter) —

because I'm a bit older,

and he has a bit more net worth than I do.

Larry Page: Well, thank you.

CR: So we'll have a conversation about

the Internet, and we'll have a conversation Google,

and we'll have a conversation about search

and privacy,

and also about your philosophy

and a sense of how you've connected the dots

and how this journey that began

some time ago

has such interesting prospects.

Mainly we want to talk about the future.

So my first question: Where is Google

and where is it going?

LP: Well, this is something we think about a lot,

and our mission we defined a long time ago

is to organize the world's information

and make it universally accessible and useful.

And people always say,

is that really what you guys are still doing?

And I always kind of think about that myself,

and I'm not quite sure.

But actually, when I think about search,

it's such a deep thing for all of us,

to really understand what you want,

to understand the world's information,

and we're still very much in the early stages of that,

which is totally crazy.

We've been at it for 15 years already,

but it's not at all done.

CR: When it's done, how will it be?

LP: Well, I guess,

in thinking about where we're going --

you know, why is it not done? --

a lot of it is just computing's kind of a mess.

You know, your computer
doesn't know where you are,

it doesn't know what you're doing,

it doesn't know what you know,

and a lot we've been trying to do recently

is just make your devices work,

make them understand your context.

Google Now, you know, knows where you are,

knows what you may need.

So really having computing
work and understand you

and understand that information,

we really haven't done that yet.

It's still very, very clunky.

CR: Tell me, when you look at what Google is doing,

where does Deep Mind fit?

LP: Yeah, so Deep Mind is a company

we just acquired recently.

It's in the U.K.

First, let me tell you the way we got there,

which was looking at search

and really understanding,

trying to understand everything,

and also make the computers not clunky

and really understand you --

like, voice was really important.

So what's the state of the art
on speech recognition?

It's not very good.

It doesn't really understand you.

So we started doing machine learning research

to improve that.

That helped a lot.

And we started just looking at things like YouTube.

Can we understand YouTube?

But we actually ran machine learning on YouTube

and it discovered cats, just by itself.

Now, that's an important concept.

And we realized there's really something here.

If we can learn what cats are,

that must be really important.

So I think Deep Mind,

what's really amazing about Deep Mind

is that it can actually --

they're learning things in this unsupervised way.

They started with video games,

and really just, maybe I can show the video,

just playing video games,

and learning how to do that automatically.

CR: Take a look at the video games

and how machines are coming to be able

to do some remarkable things.

LP: The amazing thing about this

is this is, I mean, obviously,

these are old games,

but the system just sees what you see, the pixels,

and it has the controls and it has the score,

and it's learned to play all of these games,

same program.

It's learned to play all of these games

with superhuman performance.

We've not been able to do things like this

with computers before.

And maybe I'll just narrate this one quickly.

This is boxing, and it figures out it can

sort of pin the opponent down.

The computer's on the left,

and it's just racking up points.

So imagine if this kind

of intelligence were thrown at your schedule,

or your information needs, or things like that.

We're really just at the beginning of that,

and that's what I'm really excited about.

CR: When you look at all that's taken place

with Deep Mind and the boxing,

also a part of where we're going

is artificial intelligence.

Where are we, when you look at that?

LP: Well, I think for me,

this is kind of one of the most exciting things

I've seen in a long time.

The guy who started this company, Demis,

has a neuroscience and a
computer science background.

He went back to school

to get his Ph.D. to study the brain.

And so I think we're seeing a lot of exciting work

going on that sort of crosses computer science

and neuroscience

in terms of really understanding

what it takes to make something smart

and do really interesting things.

CR: But where's the level of it now?

And how fast do you think we are moving?

LP: Well, this is the state of the art right now,

understanding cats on YouTube

and things like that,

improving voice recognition.

We used a lot of machine learning

to improve things incrementally,

but I think for me, this example's really exciting,

because it's one program

that can do a lot of different things.

CR: I don't know if we can do this,

but we've got the image of the cat.

It would be wonderful to see this.

This is how machines looked at cats

and what they came up with.

Can we see that image?

LP: Yeah.
CR: There it is. Can you see the cat?

Designed by machines, seen by machines.

LP: That's right.

So this is learned from just watching YouTube.

And there's no training,

no notion of a cat,

but this concept of a cat

is something important that you would understand,

and now that the machines can kind of understand.

Maybe just finishing

also on the search part,

it started with search, really understanding

people's context and their information.

I did have a video

I wanted to show quickly on that

that we actually found.

(Video) ["Soy, Kenya"]

Zack Matere: Not long ago,

I planted a crop of potatoes.

Then suddenly they started
dying one after the other.

I checked out the books and
they didn't tell me much.

So, I went and I did a search.

["Zack Matere, Farmer"]

Potato diseases.

One of the websites told me

that ants could be the problem.

It said, sprinkle wood ash over the plants.

Then after a few days the ants disappeared.

I got excited about the Internet.

I have this friend

who really would like to expand his business.

So I went with him to the cyber cafe

and we checked out several sites.

When I met him next, he was going to put a windmill

at the local school.

I felt proud because

something that wasn't there before

was suddenly there.

I realized that not everybody

can be able to access

what I was able to access.

I thought that I need to have an Internet

that my grandmother can use.

So I thought about a notice board.

A simple wooden notice board.

When I get information on my phone,

I'm able to post the information

on the notice board.

So it's basically like a computer.

I use the Internet to help people.

I think I am searching for

a better life

for me and my neighbors.

So many people have access to information,

but there's no follow-up to that.

I think the follow-up to that is our knowledge.

When people have the knowledge,

they can find solutions

without having to helped out.

Information is powerful,

but it is how we use it that will define us.

(Applause)

LP: Now, the amazing thing about that video,

actually, was we just read about it in the news,

and we found this gentlemen,

and made that little clip.

CR: When I talk to people about you,

they say to me, people who know you well, say,

Larry wants to change the world,

and he believes technology can show the way.

And that means access to the Internet.

It has to do with languages.

It also means how people can get access

and do things that will affect their community,

and this is an example.

LP: Yeah, that's right, and I think for me,

I have been focusing on access more,

if we're talking about the future.

We recently released this Loon Project

which is using balloons to do it.

It sounds totally crazy.

We can show the video here.

Actually, two out of three people in the world

don't have good Internet access now.

We actually think this can really help people

sort of cost-efficiently.

CR: It's a balloon.
LP: Yeah, get access to the Internet.

CR: And why does this balloon give you access

to the Internet?

Because there was some interesting things

you had to do to figure out how

to make balloons possible,

they didn't have to be tethered.

LP: Yeah, and this is a good example of innovation.

Like, we've been thinking about this idea

for five years or more

before we started working on it,

but it was just really,

how do we get access points up high, cheaply?

You normally have to use satellites

and it takes a long time to launch them.

But you saw there how easy it is to launch a balloon

and get it up,

and actually again, it's the power of the Internet,

I did a search on it,

and I found, 30, 40 years ago,

someone had put up a balloon

and it had gone around the Earth multiple times.

And I thought, why can't we do that today?

And that's how this project got going.

CR: But are you at the mercy of the wind?

LP: Yeah, but it turns out,

we did some weather simulations

which probably hadn't really been done before,

and if you control the altitude of the balloons,

which you can do by pumping air into them

and other ways,

you can actually control roughly where they go,

and so I think we can build a worldwide mesh

of these balloons that can cover the whole planet.

CR: Before I talk about the future and transportation,

where you've been a nerd for a while,

and this fascination you have with transportation

and automated cars and bicycles,

let me talk a bit about what's been the subject here

earlier with Edward Snowden.

It is security and privacy.

You have to have been thinking about that.

LP: Yeah, absolutely.

I saw the picture of Sergey with
Edward Snowden yesterday.

Some of you may have seen it.

But I think, for me, I guess,

privacy and security are a really important thing.

We think about it in terms of both things,

and I think you can't have privacy without security,

so let me just talk about security first,

because you asked about Snowden and all of that,

and then I'll say a little bit about privacy.

I think for me, it's tremendously disappointing

that the government

secretly did all this stuff and didn't tell us.

I don't think we can have a democracy

if we're having to protect you and our users

from the government

for stuff that we've never had a conversation about.

And I don't mean we have to know

what the particular terrorist attack is they're worried

about protecting us from,

but we do need to know

what the parameters of it is,

what kind of surveillance the government's

going to do and how and why,

and I think we haven't had that conversation.

So I think the government's actually done

itself a tremendous disservice

by doing all that in secret.

CR: Never coming to Google

to ask for anything.

LP: Not Google, but the public.

I think we need to
have a debate about that,

or we can't have a functioning democracy.

It's just not possible.

So I'm sad that Google's

in the position of protecting you and our users

from the government

doing secret thing that nobody knows about.

It doesn't make any sense.

CR: Yeah. And then there's a privacy side of it.

LP: Yes. The privacy side,

I think it's -- the world is changing.

You carry a phone. It knows where you are.

There's so much more information about you,

and that's an important thing,

and it makes sense why people are asking

difficult questions.

We spend a lot of time thinking about this

and what the issues are.

I'm a little bit --

I think the main thing that we need to do

is just provide people choice,

show them what data's being collected --

search history, location data.

We're excited about incognito mode in Chrome,

and doing that in more ways,

just giving people more choice

and more awareness of what's going on.

I also think it's very easy.

What I'm worried is that we throw out

the baby with the bathwater.

And I look at, on your show, actually,

I kind of lost my voice,

and I haven't gotten it back.

I'm hoping that by talking to you

I'm going to get it back.

CR: If I could do anything, I would do that.

LP: All right. So get out your voodoo doll

and whatever you need to do.

But I think, you know what, I look at that,

I made that public,

and I got all this information.

We got a survey done on medical conditions

with people who have similar issues,

and I look at medical records, and I say,

wouldn't it be amazing

if everyone's medical records were available

anonymously

to research doctors?

And when someone accesses your medical record,

a research doctor,

they could see, you could see which doctor

accessed it and why,

and you could maybe learn about

what conditions you have.

I think if we just did that,

we'd save 100,000 lives this year.

CR: Absolutely. Let me go — (Applause)

LP: So I guess I'm just very worried that

with Internet privacy,

we're doing the same thing we're
doing with medical records,

is we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater,

and we're not really thinking

about the tremendous good that can come

from people sharing information

with the right people in the right ways.

CR: And the necessary condition

that people have to have confidence

that their information will not be abused.

LP: Yeah, and I had this problem with my voice stuff.

I was scared to share it.

Sergey encouraged me to do that,

and it was a great thing to do.

CR: And the response has been overwhelming.

LP: Yeah, and people are super positive.

We got thousands and thousands of people

with similar conditions,

which there's no data on today.

So it was a really good thing.

CR: So talking about the future, what is it about you

and transportation systems?

LP: Yeah. I guess I was just frustrated

with this when I was at college in Michigan.

I had to get on the bus and take it

and wait for it.

And it was cold and snowing.

I did some research on how much it cost,

and I just became a bit obsessed
with transportation systems.

CR: And that began the idea of an automated car.

LP: Yeah, about 18 years ago I learned about

people working on automated cars,

and I became fascinated by that,

and it takes a while to
get these projects going,

but I'm super excited about the possibilities of that

improving the world.

There's 20 million people or more injured per year.

It's the leading cause of death

for people under 34 in the U.S.

CR: So you're talking about saving lives.

LP: Yeah, and also saving space

and making life better.

Los Angeles is half parking lots and roads,

half of the area,

and most cities are not far behind, actually.

It's just crazy

that that's what we use our space for.

CR: And how soon will we be there?

LP: I think we can be there very, very soon.

We've driven well over 100,000 miles

now totally automated.

I'm super excited about getting that out quickly.

CR: But it's not only you're
talking about automated cars.

You also have this idea for bicycles.

LP: Well at Google, we got this idea

that we should just provide free bikes to everyone,

and that's been amazing, most of the trips.

You see bikes going everywhere,

and the bikes wear out.

They're getting used 24 hours a day.

CR: But you want to put them above the street, too.

LP: Well I said, how do we get people

using bikes more?

CR: We may have a video here.

LP: Yeah, let's show the video.

I just got excited about this.

(Music)

So this is actually how you might separate

bikes from cars with minimal cost.

Anyway, it looks totally crazy,

but I was actually thinking about our campus,

working with the Zippies and stuff,

and just trying to get a lot more bike usage,

and I was thinking about,

how do you cost-effectively separate

the bikes from traffic?

And I went and searched,

and this is what I found.

And we're not actually working on this,

that particular thing,

but it gets your imagination going.

CR: Let me close with this.

Give me a sense of the philosophy
of your own mind.

You have this idea of [Google X].

You don't simply want

to go in some small, measurable arena of progress.

LP: Yeah, I think

many of the things we just
talked about are like that,

where they're really --

I almost use the economic concept of additionality,

which means that you're doing something

that wouldn't happen unless
you were actually doing it.

And I think the more you can do things like that,

the bigger impact you have,

and that's about doing things

that people might not think are possible.

And I've been amazed,

the more I learn about technology,

the more I realize I don't know,

and that's because this technological horizon,

the thing that you can see to do next,

the more you learn about technology,

the more you learn what's possible.

You learn that the balloons are possible

because there's some material
that will work for them.

CR: What's interesting about
you too, though, for me,

is that, we have lots of people

who are thinking about the future,

and they are going and looking
and they're coming back,

but we never see the implementation.

I think of somebody you knew

and read about, Tesla.

The principle of that for you is what?

LP: Well, I think invention is not enough.

If you invent something,

Tesla invented electric power that we use,

but he struggled to get it out to people.

That had to be done by other people.

It took a long time.

And I think if we can actually combine both things,

where we have an innovation and invention focus,

plus the ability to really -- a company

that can really commercialize things

and get them to people

in a way that's positive for the world

and to give people hope.

You know, I'm amazed with the Loon Project

just how excited people were about that,

because it gave them hope

for the two thirds of the world

that doesn't have Internet right now that's any good.

CR: Which is a second thing about corporations.

You are one of those people who believe

that corporations are an agent of change

if they are run well.

LP: Yeah. I'm really dismayed

most people think companies are basically evil.

They get a bad rap.

And I think that's somewhat correct.

Companies are doing the same incremental thing

that they did 50 years ago

or 20 years ago.

That's not really what we need.

We need, especially in technology,

we need revolutionary change,

not incremental change.

CR: You once said, actually,

as I think I've got this about right,

that you might consider,

rather than giving your money,

if you were leaving it to some cause,

just simply giving it to Elon Musk,

because you had confidence

that he would change the future,

and that you would therefore —

LP: Yeah, if you want to go Mars,

he wants to go to Mars,

to back up humanity,

that's a worthy goal, but it's a company,

and it's philanthropical.

So I think we aim to do kind of similar things.

And I think, you ask, we have a lot of employees

at Google who have become pretty wealthy.

People make a lot of money in technology.

A lot of people in the room are pretty wealthy.

You're working because you
want to change the world.

You want to make it better.

Why isn't the company that you work for

worthy not just of your time

but your money as well?

I mean, but we don't have a concept of that.

That's not how we think about companies,

and I think it's sad,

because companies are most of our effort.

They're where most of people's time is,

where a lot of the money is,

and so I think I'd like for us to help out

more than we are.

CR: When I close conversations with lots of people,

I always ask this question:

What state of mind,

what quality of mind is it

that has served you best?

People like Rupert Murdoch have said curiosity,

and other people in the media have said that.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have said focus.

What quality of mind,

as I leave this audience,

has enabled you to think about the future

and at the same time

change the present?

LP: You know, I think the most important thing --

I looked at lots of companies

and why I thought they don't succeed over time.

We've had a more rapid turnover of companies.

And I said, what did they fundamentally do wrong?

What did those companies all do wrong?

And usually it's just that they missed the future.

And so I think, for me,

I just try to focus on that and say,

what is that future really going to be

and how do we create it,

and how do we cause our organization,

to really focus on that

and drive that at a really high rate?

And so that's been curiosity,

it's been looking at things

people might not think about,

working on things that no one else is working on,

because that's where the additionality really is,

and be willing to do that,

to take that risk.

Look at Android.

I felt guilty about working on Android

when it was starting.

It was a little startup we bought.

It wasn't really what we were really working on.

And I felt guilty about spending time on that.

That was stupid.

That was the future, right?

That was a good thing to be working on.

CR: It is great to see you here.

It's great to hear from you,

and a pleasure to sit at this table with you.

Thanks, Larry.

LP: Thank you.

(Applause)

CR: Larry Page.