Self-driving cars and an overhaul of the 40-hour work week were some of the many highlights of a fireside chat held between Google's founders and a venture capitalist who couldn't compel his associates to buy the search engine way back when.
After musing over what could have been if Excite, one of the '90s top search engines, had listened to him and acquired Google, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla got Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google's founders, to reveal their vision of the future.
The chat, held at Kholsa's KV Summit 2014, saw Page and Brin covering a lot of radical ideas that Google has the power to push to fruition.
Removing the wheel from the hands of drivers, in Brin's opinion, could free up congestion on the roadways and invalidate the need for vehicle ownership.
"With self-driving cars, you don't really need much in the way of parking, because you don't need one car per person," said Brin. "They just come and get you when you need them. You can also make much more efficient road use, if you -- and this is not something we've developed yet, but it's certainly been simulated by many -- they can form trains. They can go at high speed, perhaps much higher than our highway speeds here."
The self-driving cars would lend themselves to revolutionary changes in vehicle designs. One example of design changes Brin suggested was the orientation of seats. Motorists could all face one another, enhancing human interaction.
Self-driving cars would allot more time for commuters to be productive, although Page feels working individuals could spend less time at a single job. Page stated his belief that there should be more affordable housing and a little less employment, because, he reasoned, humans need little to be content.
"If you really think about the things that you need to make yourself happy -- housing, security, opportunities for your kids -- anthropologists have been identifying these things. It's not that hard for us to provide those things," Page said. "The amount of resources we need to do that, the amount of work that actually needs to go into that, is pretty small. I'm guessing less than 1 percent at the moment. So the idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet people's needs is just not true."
During the fireside chat, Page and Brin also revealed a bit of criticism they received from Apple founder Steve Jobs. Page stated his response to Jobs' notion that Google attempted to do too many things.
"I always thought it was kind of stupid if you have this big company and you can only do like five things," said Page. "And I also think it's not very good for the employees, because then you have like 30,000 employees and they're all doing the same thing, which isn't very exciting for them."
