Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Find some fun way to get a little more oil on your hands or mud on your boots. Sometimes, that's what it takes to take down some of the really big problems.
If we want to help Google become something meaningfully different in the future, then that's more likely to happen if we focus on the physical world instead.
It's crazy that you have to tell your phone or your computer or your house or your car 'It's me!' hundreds of times a day. Wearables will solve that problem.
I'm a father to four kids, so it bothers me that even though our children think big naturally, our society systematically trains them out of thinking that way.
We don't take on Google Glass or the self-driving car project or Project Loon unless we think that on a risk-adjusted basis, it's worth Google's money to do it.
I grant that people are generally uncomfortable with how fast privacy issues are changing in the world, but Google Glass is not going to move the needle on that.
We don't have some message from God that gives us a list of what's good and what's not good. Obviously, we have to make our own flawed judgments about each thing.
A ten-times increase in the weight-oriented density of batteries would enable so many other moonshots, if we can find a great idea. We just haven't found one yet.
The Explorer edition of Glass wasn't for everyone, but the Explorer program pushed us to find a wide range of near-term applications and uses for something like Glass.
When you go into a bar, there are hundreds and hundreds of cameras in that bar - many of them installed by that bar. They might be checking something or taking a picture of you.
When technology reaches that level of invisibility in our lives, that's our ultimate goal. It vanishes into our lives. It says, 'You don't have to do the work; I'll do the work.'
Why shoot for the moon? It matters because when you try to do something radically hard, you approach the problem differently than when you try to make something incrementally better.
If you're shooting to make the world 10% better, you're in a smartness contest with everyone else in the world - and you're going to lose. There are too many smart people in the world.
Phones would not be better if they could be cooler looking, if they could weight less, or if they could have more battery. Phones would be better if we didn't have to carry them around.
When you try to do something ten per cent better, you tend to work from where you are: if I ask you to make a car that goes 50 miles a gallon, you can just retool the engine you already have.
There's no point having something worn on your body - that's a big ask - unless you can give people something they really couldn't get otherwise. It has to be qualitatively better for it to be worn.
Wouldn't it be awesome if we had a jetpack that wasn't a death trap? The problem is that it is going to be so power inefficient. I just couldn't live with that... it would be as loud as a motorcycle.
I started my second company in 1999. BodyMedia was set up to take advantage of the future of wearables - sensors and computing worn on our bodies in any and all ways that could make our lives better.
I believe that the right thing for us to do, as much as we can and without confusing people, is to talk about how we're doing, the things that are going well but also the things that aren't going well.
The moonshot for Google Glass is to harmonize the physical and digital worlds. It is specifically to find a way to help people be naturally, elegantly situated, physical and digitally, at the same time.
When you attack a problem as though it were solvable, even though you don't know how to solve it, you will be shocked with what you come up with. It's 100 times more worth it. It's never 100 times harder.
To say a scientist is not at all responsible is wrong. But to say that someone who invents a piece of knowledge or technology is responsible for all future uses is ridiculous. It doesn't have to be that binary.
When we try to make a car that drives itself, we believe - whether we're right or not - we believe that there would be strong net positive benefit to the world if cars could drive themselves safer than people could.
Our goal is not to produce immediate results. We've been tasked with producing long-term results. That means that there's more risk in any individual thing we take on. But we still aspire to a strong return on investment.
I think we'll see, not only with Glass, but the watch wearables, with the contact lens, that each of these things have their own best purpose, but it will take more on our part and society's part to figure out what that is.
Building intelligent machines can teach us about our minds - about who we are - and those lessons will make our world a better place. To win that knowledge, though, our species will have to trade in another piece of its vanity.
Rather than thinking of ourselves as a computer, and trying to give you computer-like functionality, it's better to start from the understanding that this is a pair of glasses, and say, 'How smart can we make these glasses for you?'
There's this open question of what Google is going to be a decade or more from now. Google X isn't the only answer to that question, but it was built as a place to do some of the exploration to find some great new problems for Google to tackle.
We've got rings, glasses, we wear things for armor, for protection from the elements, to signal our status to other people. And we're going to co-opt a lot of those things, where wearables are going to end up being the interface between us in the world.
Our culture already has a number of well known stories about artificial life and non-human intelligence. In 'Exegesis,' I've tried to not only tell a new and engaging story but also to comment on those well known stories through the details of my novel.
Most of us have to spend a lot of energy to learn how to drive a car. Then we have to spend the rest of our lives over-concentrating as we drive and text and eat a burrito and put on makeup. As a result, 30,000 people die every year in a car accident in the U.S.
If you don't have a tonne of optimism, you're not going to make it... you won't be able to evangelise to everyone else. On the other hand, if you aren't constantly paranoid about what can go wrong and put plans in place, then you're going to get bitten at some point.
Every day, hundreds of millions of people stab themselves, bleed, and then offer, like a sacrifice, to the glucose monitor they're carrying with them. It's such a bad user interface that even though in the medium-term it's life or death for these people, hundreds of millions of people don't engage in this user interface.
We are proposing that there is value in a totally new product category and a totally new set of questions. Just like the Apple II proposed, 'Would you reasonably want a computer in your home if you weren't an accountant or professional?' That is the question Glass is asking, and I hope in the end that is how it will be judged.
It comes up over and over and over again that a ten times increase in the weight-oriented density of batteries or the volume metric, the space-oriented density of batteries, would enable so many other moonshots that that's one that just constantly comes up over and over again, and we will start that moonshot if we can find a great idea.