Larry Page, co-founder and CEO of Google, sat down with Charlie Rose last week at TED 2014 to give an in depth interview about what Google has planned for the future.
Here are some of the highlights.
Where Is Google And Where Is It Going?
Google’s mission long ago was to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. Is that really what Google is still doing? Larry Page says he’s not sure. Larry says Google is still in the early stages when it comes to understanding the world’s information.
Google has been at it for 15 years already but they’re not at all done. Larry says they’re not done because computing is kind of a mess. Google is trying to make devices work better by understanding context and learning more about the individual user, Google Now is a perfect example of that. Larry says through these endeavours Google has realized they have a long way to go when it comes to machine learning.
Larry Page Wants The Entire World To Have Internet Access
Larry discusses a vision he has for changing the world by making the Internet accessible everywhere. Larry shares the details of a plan Google has to connect the world by building a “worldwide mesh” of balloons. This mesh of balloons would be used to provide Internet access to the two thirds of the world living without it.
Larry says Google has been planning this for about five years. They arrived at the idea of balloons after thinking about how they could get Internet access points up high, and cheaply. Using balloons is cheaper than using satellites.
Privacy And Security
Larry says Google wants to be as transparent as possible and give users a choice. Larry says the most important thing is to show users what data is being collected about them, such as search history and location data.
Larry points to incognito mode in Google Chrome as something they’d like to start doing more of in other ways. They want to make users more aware of what data is being collected about them and offer a choice as to how much data is collected.
Future Ideas
Larry presented another radical idea of making everyone’s medical records available anonymously to research doctors. When a research doctor accesses your medical record you could see which doctor accessed it and why.
Larry believes if this were done, people could learn a lot more about what conditions they have. “I think if we just did that, we could save 100,000 lives this year,” Larry says.
Larry suggests that we shouldn’t “throw out the baby with the bathwater” when it comes to protecting the privacy of users. He believes a tremendous amount of good could come from people sharing information with the right people in the right ways.
Larry also discusses his fascination with self-driving cars and their potential to save lives, and how much he admires the founder of Tesla who’s goal is to go to Mars.
This is an exceptional interview that provides a rare look at what goes on inside the mind of the co-founder and CEO of Google. I highly recommend checking out the full video below.
