Astro Teller
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.Collection: Car
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.Collection: Car
Doing exercise without monitoring yourself will be rare in the future of wearable technology.Collection: Technology
The real goal of AI is to understand and build devices that can perceive, reason, act, and learn at least as well as we can.
The world is not limited by IQ. We are all limited by bravery and creativity.
Moonshot thinking starts with picking a big problem: something huge, long existing, or on a global scale.
The longer you work on something, the more you don't really want to know what the world is going to tell you.
Really great entrepreneurs have this very special mix of unstoppable optimism and scathing paranoia.
Use creativity and storytelling as your main muscle instead of smartness.
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.
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.
I personally have a philosophy around authenticity and vulnerability.
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.
I do believe that making a factory for innovation, a moon-shot factory, is possible.
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.
VisiCalc and WordPerfect were the killer apps of their day, but Google and Facebook make them look small in comparison.
I think wearables in general have, as their best calling, to better understand our current state and needs and to express those back to the world.
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.
Here is the surprising truth: It's often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better.
Moonshots live in that place between audacious projects and pure science fiction.
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.
We need to make sure that the things we are already working on turn out to do the things we believe they can do and creating value both for the world and ultimately for Google.
Without getting into specifics, I assure you we are looking at very substantial opportunities for Loon - Google-scale opportunities.
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?'
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.
Making a moonshot is almost more an exercise in creativity than it is in technology.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, that issue of 'Don't be evil' is probably the number one reason we throw out ideas.
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.
The faster you can get your ideas in contact with the real world, the faster you can discover what is broken with your idea.
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.
People text when they're meant to actually be driving. So imagine what they do when they think the car's got it under control.
Really, having people who have different mental perspectives is what's important.
If you want to explore things you haven't explored, having people who look just like you and think just like you is not the best way.
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.
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.
Google Glass is the wearable computer that responds to voice commands and displays information on a visual display.
The cycling helmet can save your life, but it doesn't look good and tends to ruin your hair.
The future is all about leading a stress-free life and having all the solutions for all problems at hand.
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.
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.
Going from an error rate of 25 meters in GPS to 2.5 meters is huge. Going to 25 centimeters is going to matter just as much.
There is no law of physics that says just because we're connected, there has to be this schism between our physical lives and our digital lives.
We're excited about how tech can be used to get tech out of the way.
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.
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.
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.
The great decision was the Explorer program. The thing we did not do well is that we allowed and somewhat encouraged too much exposure to the program.