Sergey Brin - An Insight An Idea

That's a fantastic question. First of all, let me just say all of you that you maybe should doubt my answer. It's a little bit... So when I was heading up Google X a few years back, one little project we had in there, which is now called Google Brain, which was this AI effort, but I didn't pay attention to it at all, to be perfectly honest. And myself, having been trained as a computer scientist in the 90s, everybody knew AI didn't work. It's not like people tried it; they tried neural nets, none of them worked out. And this fellow who was one of our top computer scientists, Jeff Dean, would periodically come up to me and say, 'Look, the computer made a picture of a cat.' And I'd say, 'Okay, that's very nice, Jeff. Go do your thing, whatever.' And for a few years, now, that brain probably touches every single one of our main projects, ranging from search to photos to ads to everything we do. And this kind of revolution in deep nets has been very profound and definitely surprised me, even though I was right in there, sitting like I could throw paper clips at him. It's an incredible time, and it's very hard to forecast what these things can do. We don't really know the limits. In a hundred years, if we imagine ourselves, these can do everything we can imagine and more. It's a hard thing to think through and has really incredible possibilities, but I think it's impossible to forecast accurately.

I think it definitely requires some thought. And incredibly, I'm here at Davos and I'm just shocked at how I feel like the Luddite in the room. Everybody's talking about how do we cope with this increased automation and the jobs displaced and so forth. And I feel like the one saying, 'Oh, actually, that's pretty hard to do with a computer.' I kind of know what we're trying to accomplish to make that technology work. I think a lot of folks here are, I think correctly, forward-thinking, taking some of those innovations for granted and then saying, 'Whoa, what does that mean for society and so forth?' I think that's the right thing to do. I think thinking through AI is the continuing of the automation that we've seen in the past 200 years, and how that evolves society and economy and social order is the smart thing to do. I don't think it's impossible somehow, but it deserves a lot of thought. You cannot say stop it; you can channel it.

Yeah, well, I think you can approach health from several levels. You say, what are the specific things that we are afflicted with, whether it's heart health or cancer or Parkinson's, which I'm personally passionate about? You look at the specifics of treatments and understanding of those diseases. You could look at the more fundamental research. You've seen what CRISPR, for example, has allowed biologists across all disease categories to use as a tool. It's just a more general kind of biochemistry innovation. And genomics has obviously brought us a lot of innovation there broadly. But then you could also ask the next question, leading to what you said about the digital revolution: if we had smarter processing, smarter software, could it unveil patterns and understanding? Should we just be working on the machine learning solutions that are broadly going to allow us to do more in biology, but also in other fields in the economy, electronics, and astronomy? So it's a whole set of layers. These lower-level layers, the increased machine learning and so forth, span the gamut of human endeavors. Therefore, when you invest in those things, you get this multiplied effect. But of course, you still need to do the biology, understand the individual diseases, and ultimately treat individual people.

I think that is imaginable. I think you can imagine that. You've imagined well: you're going to be sort of transplanted into a digital realm to live forever. You can imagine that in your biological incarnation, you are going to live to be some very long age. I think it is almost impossible to predict. In fact, the evolution of technology might be an errant path. It could have been the case a couple hundred years back that if electricity evolved a little bit faster compared to internal combustion, we all would have been driving electric cars today. Then somebody would have a newfangled internal combustion thing, and that would be kind of weird. But history happened to go one way. Maybe there are fundamental inherent reasons for that. But when you ask these kinds of questions about the future—what does it mean to be human in the future, what does it mean to be an individual versus society, where are we going in the long term—these are deep, powerful, fundamental philosophical questions. But I don't know that we are equipped to answer them. I think it's premature because we don't know yet how the technology will look.

Well, you might then further ask, why do we need elected leaders because you might as well have all the decisions made? I think that's one. Yeah, I mean, you're venturing into profound questions. You can also ask what we will actually want. We have a set of values and desires today that are probably pretty different than before the Industrial Revolution and different still than before the agrarian revolution. We might continue to evolve. Many of us today participate in the global economy, developing and so forth. Some of us choose to be Buddhist monks and seek enlightenment through spirituality. So I think people have different ways of evolving and finding meaning in different situations. It could be that the way we look at it 100 years from now is so different than we look at it today that it's almost unrecognizable to us. The thinking, the rationale, and the desires—we wouldn't even be able to translate.

Oh, 100%. I mean, I think if you were to go back in time 10,000 years and meet somebody working in their field, you would say, 'Where are you?' They probably wouldn't even ask me what I do; that wouldn't be a meaningful question. But if you were to say, 'I'm an economist,' they'd be like, 'Wow, my field?' Then we could talk more about whatever it is you do. I think it is exactly true. If some of the burdens of day-to-day life have been increasingly alleviated through technology, through agriculture and so forth, maybe that leaves us free to think more deeply about who we are and what it is we seek.

Yeah, I mean, once again, I've been really blown away this year. I haven't been to the Forum for about eight years, and I think the level of enlightenment and conversation between politicians, business leaders, and social entrepreneurs is incredible to me. That's the kind of interaction that will breed success. I think also, not forgetting outside of here, often times it's a very antagonistic relationship between government and business, and I think that is also very unhealthy. So I think not only should we try to tackle things more quickly, but also in a real collaborative way.

I think that was a fantastic question. I think the sessions I've attended, everybody is asking that question. I guess I would hope that as some of the more mundane tasks are alleviated through technology, people find more and more creative and meaningful ways to spend their time. The word 'job' specifically has a lot of implication. The way we might have spent the past couple generations, 'job' means you go to the office, you do some things, you have papers, you have an inbox, you have an outbox. I think our mindset is somewhat narrow in that way. Yet we have jobs that are more creative and thoughtful. Take economists, for example, which is a hard thing to describe to a farmer 4,000 years ago. 'Oh, you're an engineer?' Sorry, okay, we have something on the list here. It's the World Economic Forum. I think engineering is pretty easy to describe to folks, but being an economist is not that easy to describe. It's not that we need five billion economists, but the point is that if you continue that trajectory, you do see more and more people that have been freed up over the past couple hundred years to do work that is more about thinking about things or creating things, seeking aesthetics, whether in an intellectual domain or a purely artistic domain. I would hope to see that trend continue. I would hope that the world would find an opportunity—this is where I think education becomes very important. I think broad education, but as some of these jobs are displaced, giving people the opportunity to get educated, having the education resources and the financial wherewithal to pursue that. You don't want to be studying Shakespeare and going hungry. Being somewhat open-minded, giving people a chance to develop different skills that aren't necessarily the 5,000 needs for this exact kind of thing today, because probably the thing that you want exactly 5,000 of today is the thing that is more realistically automatable. So I think it's important for people to have freedom to study, financial opportunity to study, and to get meaning. In addition to work being an important way we exchange money, people find profound meaning in their day-to-day jobs, and I think that's another important thing for us to preserve.

I think there are several systems that we have in place that, for a lot of understandable reasons, have so much inertia they lag behind. Education is one, and healthcare honestly is another. I don't mean healthcare in the sense of finding the biological roots of disease; I mean the healthcare systems of hospitals, insurance, national or employer-based. These systems are just so deeply embedded from an infrastructure point of view, from a governance point of view, they're very hard to transform and update to today's needs. But I think that is the challenge we should seek to overcome. Within education, I just think everyone should have access to education, starting with primary, secondary, university, and postgraduate work. Those things are extraordinarily expensive today because of artifacts of the infrastructure where we assume we need big buildings and fancy classrooms. I don't think those things are necessary. It's fine to have those for some folks, but education should be universally accessible.

I think, look, first of all, I'm very lucky to have been in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is very lucky to have been able to benefit from the semiconductor boom, then software, and now the internet and mobile. I think there's a huge amount of luck there. But the luck also comes from taking many shots. So many failures—if I told you all the dumb things that I did, we'd have to have a much longer session. The successes are often chance. I mentioned the Google Brain work; they were just off in the corner, and I said, 'Okay, fine, just do your thing.' Or Verily, our subsidiary that does a wide range of healthcare innovation, really started with this glucose-sensing contact lens project. That was another one where I said, 'This fella Babak and Brian are working on it. They wanted to put a computer in a contact lens. I was like, that sounds crazy, but you go do your crazy thing. You can only have a couple people work on it, and I'm not going to give you a lot of resources, but sure, if you put a computer in a contact lens, good for you.' Yet here they are a few years later, running serious studies, they have a big partnership with Novartis and Alcon, and they are hopefully going to bring those to market alongside a bunch of other projects that that has spawned. I didn't know anything about that, and I never would have predicted or guessed that. I think we're just lucky to have the environment that tolerates making lots of risky bets and tolerating the failures that inevitably result.

You know, I think young people in some ways their life is much easier than my life might have been at that stage. For all of us, having to travel to Switzerland would be a big stressful thing: how do you get in touch with people before mobile phones, arrange your travel, figure out how to exchange your currency? There are many things we can whip our phones out and look up anything and figure out how to get somewhere. There are a lot of affordances today that make it easy. But there is also a global stage that makes it hard. When I was in school, I was on the math team, and I was just compared to other kids in the school. I did quite well against them, and I thought, 'I'm good at that.' I think younger folks today, their measures of themselves are always on this global stage. They think, 'I have to be number one in the world at this.' That's a really tall order, and I think it can be discouraging. You know, the spokes say, 'I'm number 1,000 in the world at this game,' which in my world would have been an enormous achievement because that means you were definitely the best in your city and your state. But it's hard. I think there's a little bit of discouragement. So I would encourage young folks to take chances and pursue their dreams, and try to silence the voice that says, 'There are a thousand startups trying to do whatever it is you're doing.'

Yeah, I mean, I certainly had no dreams of much economic success. I think you're exactly right. I think you should have fun and not be so weighed down by the weight of expectations that this global network, unfortunately, one of the downsides, I think creates that weight.

First of all, yeah, I think that's a very good question, an amazing question. Not having been in Davos for ten or eight years, I'm kind of even confused in a good way. There are all these business executives and CEOs, and everyone is wondering, 'How are our people going to find purpose? What about all these refugees? What about income inequality?' I kind of feel like I'm at Burning Man, except everyone is wearing clothes. But I think it's wonderful. So I think for whatever weird reason, maybe because we're kind of San Francisco hippies, Google has always had this social responsibility view, also inspired by Salesforce and Marc Benioff and his philanthropic work as part of the company. I think you're phrasing it exactly correctly. I think it can't be the case that companies such as ours are just purely profit motivated. You can't just take Adam Smith—well, apparently I've learned here that Adam Smith's earlier work was actually much more touchy-feely than 'The Wealth of Nations'—but you can't just think narrowly, 'This is your business, you're just going to maximize earnings, it doesn't matter what else is going on around you.' I think the leaders here are broadly concerned about climate change, wealth inequality, job creation, and all of those things. So it seems to me that companies are taking those things seriously, and we ought to be. Maybe there's some greater way to write about that and bake that into the principles of company formation. Because if you look at the laws, regulations, and SEC rules, technically you're meant to be purely profit-seeking, and that's not really a reasonable position to take.