
The future according to Google's Larry Page - Libertatea
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/01/03/google-larry-page/
======
josh_fyi
Larry is a smart guy, his success is proven, and he has the resources to make
the future happen.

But don't put too much weight on his prediction. Real innovation usually comes
from unexpected places. Historically, predictions of technology big-shots are
not as accurate as the tech press seems to think.

~~~
da02
Watching Charlie Rose over the past 15 years helps to prove this.

~~~
kragen
The TV talk show?

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Jabbles
_Google's popular 20% time, which allowed many engineers to work on their own
ideas one day a week, has been severely curtailed._

What's happened to it?

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orangethirty
I guess some manager realized that they could improve productivity by up to
20% if the engineers focused on the official company projects.

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Zakuzaa
25%

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mserdarsanli
I think he implies that the manager is stupid

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orangethirty
No, I do not. I imply that the manager does not understand the benefits of 20%
time on productivity.

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InclinedPlane
Let me spoil the joke:

Going from 80% to 100% is a 25% increase.

~~~
orangethirty
There is no joke because I was not including all of the time spent on 20% time
as a gain in productivity. Read where I wrote that they could see an increase
in productivity of _up to_ 20%. I'm not quoting exact numbers because
_drumroll_ managers hardly ever think of hard numbers. Its all
(gu)es(s)timates.

~~~
cloudsteam
sounds like an excuuuuuse ;)

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personlurking
It seems to be more about the role of Page in the company than the future of
Google. A lil' bit about driverless cars and Google Now but mostly on Page,
his background and personality.

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gulbrandr
Please do not post links with utm junk in the URL.

~~~
rkudeshi
I know when you submit a link, HN will usually automatically omit the " - Site
Name" part at the end of the title.

Given the proliferation of FeedBurner links, why can't pg do the same to get
rid of utm cruft?

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richbradshaw
For some reason I read that as if there was a page on Google called Larry.
Guess plenty of people made the same mistake with Page Rank though, so I don't
feel too bad!

~~~
dfxm12
This is why proper grammar is important. With the correct capitalization of
proper nouns, there is little room for ambiguity. Of course, that doesn't help
in speech...

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lostlogin
Everyday I park at work by a sign saying: security camera's in operation. The
daily reminder is good for me.

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Dove
That parses. It just implies there's only one security camera. And you and the
sign painter already know of and speak informally about it. And it's operating
RIGHT NOW.

~~~
lostlogin
Hadn't thought of it like that. There aren't any cameras unfortunately. The
spate of break ins was dealt with by installing a sign. A very proactive sign.
Wonder what they will do to its punctuation if 2 cameras get installed...

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alexpopescu
The clean link: <http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/01/03/google-larry-page/>

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alexpopescu
I'm half way through the article... and I still haven't figured out what the
future looks like. Anyone could summarize it here?

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zanny
Well, we are only 2 years out from flying hovercars, auto-sizing clothes, the
abolition of lawyers, reliable weather forcasts, and hoverboards.

I'd also put my money in Universal, they have 15 Jaws movies to release in 2
years. That's gotta make some bank.

~~~
cloudsteam
and pepsi will dominate over coke

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TommyDANGerous
A self driving car. Google is positioned to do anything and everything. Love
it.

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TommyDANGerous
That was such a good and inspirational read. Google is awesome.

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CletusTSJY
I can't wait for automated cars.

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gbog
I am more than ok with the self-driving car. This will really relieve us from
a heavy and unsafe burden. Our grand kids in 50 years will wonder how we did
foolishly let (almost) everyone drive so dangerous a killing machine.

But I am not ok with most other directions Google seem to be looking at:

\- Voice control: Voice control maybe useful to do some hand-less complex
configuration but it will always be awkward for normal operations of
electronic tools. To push the comparison to its limits: one would not talk to
one's screwdriver ("on the left, on the left, stop! on the right! get inside,
turn right, euh no! I mean LEFT, counterclockwise..."), one will always prefer
tools with direct interaction and feedback. Moreover, in most situations,
using voice or sound to communicate is just adding noise to already noisy envs
(eg on a plane, train, during meetings. etc).

A factory robot or a plane cockpit have full-fledged interfaces, with knobs
and screens and all, but none will use voice control or even sound feedback
except for the most urgent and intrusive warning notifications. Even the
navigation voice telling me to "turn left in 100 meters" is too intrusive,
because maybe at the same time I am talking with someone in the car. A soft
"bzzz" on the wheel to remind me to check the navigation screen should be
enough.

As anyone has experienced, the voice robot "press one for x, press two for y"
is a very good subject for jokes, because it is borderline unbearable: both
too slow and too fast, both too rigid and not solid enough. With touchscreens
in everyone pocket, I bet these usability nightmares will be replaced with
apps or websites.

So, in all, voice control, Siri and Google Now seem to be technological dead-
ends. It will probably be similar to alchemy however: it is wrong to try to
make gold out of mud, but it was the seed of Chemistry.

\- Guess my wishes: I think the "Fairy Godmother" better stay fairy tale.
Human beings have shown enough they do not like to be catered like a crowd of
sheep. History books are full of revolutions against entities willing to
"guess the wishes", from the Catholic Church, to communism, to feudalism.
Always in the name of Freedom, and freedom is best felt when you have
"unguessable wishes". If Google buys me plane tickets to Sri Lanka because it
has detected it was the most suitable destination for my tastes, I probably
will cancel the tickets and turn off Google Travel Prescience, because I want
this choice to be mine.

I know I am getting a bit too far, but I don't think most people really want
their wishes to be guessed. Everyone hopes to be unique, and choose one's
life, and decide one's fate. This is the feeling of one's freedom and guessing
wishes would just kill it.

Or, the "suggestions" must be very careful in suggesting things and must be
psychological enough to let you think that you did find the idea yourself.
Just like a careful mother will transparently suggest to a kid something to do
or not to do and at the same time will not hinder the kids' feeling of "free-
will".

~~~
brian_cloutier
I don't think you're giving the future enough credit. You discredit voice
control, but base your opinion solely on their present capabilities.

> the voice robot "press one for x, press two for y" is a very good subject
> for jokes

Interactive voice systems are among the most primitive voice control system
possible. The simplest require you "talk" using generated tones. The more
complicated accept a real voice but are hardly conversational; they present a
rigid and invisible menu of options. At least they present options, some text-
based games of lore required you to read the minds of their game designers.

But they won't always be this way. There's no reason to believe computers
won't someday become as good at conversing as humans are. Surely you've
noticed talking with a human over the phone is much faster than talking over
IM, and eventually computers will also hit that point. Imagine it: you pick up
your phone and call AT&T, the system immediately picks up and asks "Thanks for
calling customer support, may I have your PIN please?", followed by "Hello
gbog, and why are you calling today?". You respond with a simple "I'd like to
pay my phone bill" and the conversation continues.

> With touchscreens in everyone pocket, I bet these usability nightmares will
> be replaced with apps or websites.

What happens when you don't have a touchscreen in your pocket? Touchscreens
are magical and the current rage, but there's no reason to believe they are
the last word in HCI. What about Google glass? Implants? Some other form-
factor we haven't yet imagined?

Voice recognition will become faster than using apps, it's already happening!
Telling Siri to "set an alarm for 9:30 tomorrow" is much faster than unlocking
your phone, finding the right app, waiting for it to open, then messing with
those damned spinners.

> So, in all, voice control, Siri and Google Now seem to be technological
> dead-ends

Siri is a vision of the future. For the first time (if you'll allow some
narrative license) you can have something resembling a conversation with your
computer. You talk to it like you would anybody else, and it tells you what
you'd like to know. Speech is the fastest method we have of dumping
information from our brains, it's incredibly natural, and it's nearly
universal; I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually became our primary method
of controlling computers.

I don't want to make this comment too long, but a similar argument applies to
Page's vision of predicting your needs. You are focusing too much on the
present and not enough on the futures potential.

~~~
gbog
Thanks for your answer.

> "set an alarm for 9:30 tomorrow"

If tomorrow you have some unusual reason to wake up at a different time, I
agree that voice control is simpler, but this one is the kind of complex one-
time configuration I was talking about above. You should not need to give the
same order every evening, right? And even in this case, if your gf/bf just
fell asleep next to you, would you not prefer some silent way to give this
order?

I agree too that touchscreen is not the last word in HCI. But I still don't
see a future of people talking to robots. More precisely, I think that robots
will always be machines, and that the main interaction channel with machines
will not be sound waves carrying human language. I'll try to explain why.

The most useful and powerful tools and machine we have today, from chopsticks
to pen and paper to cars to computers, are all using hands and fingers. Human
being are as much defined by their language capacity than by their crafting-
by-hand capacity. When sound channel is used, for example for sherperding and
hunting, it is because it can reach far away, not because it is particularly
convenient, and it is not using normal human language anyway.

Most powerful tools are powerful because they have near infinite precision and
expressivity. Think a Chinese brush, or a violin: human language is extremely
rough compared to the range of actions allowed by these. Try to voice-control
a pen to draw a single smiley face, I would be surprised if we would recognise
the thing. In fact, I think next and next-next generations of electronic
devices, be it phones or glasses or implants, will go closer to the tight
coupling and immediate feedback we have with pens, brushes, pianos, and even
hammers or game controllers.

Many (if not most) of the interesting interactions we can have with machines
and tools are not worded and cannot be expressed in current human language.
This is a bit out of sight these days, but not everything need to be words or
text. Reading famous chefs recipes will never help you cook food if you do not
have the "hand" (and taste) for it. The HN crowd is a bit biased, with so many
bloggers and blog-readers, but many people do not consume as much text as we
do here.

The many attemps to use human natural language to describe the behavior of
systems have all failed hard, and we have to fallback on programming
languages, which, from linguistic perspective, are abominable caricatures of
human languages. This is telling. In order to control properly a computer, we
need to talk in the computer's language. Not necessarily because it is not
clever enough to understand human language, but because human language is not
the right tool for the task. Human language is very efficient in communicating
with other human beings, but not so with machines, and useful robots will be
machines.

The future will them me right or wrong, I hope to grow old enough to see it.

But allow me to imagine the intelligent glasses UI. It can display anything on
the screen. Very good, so it means that, except when alseep, the audio channel
is not needed not receiving feedback from the glasses. Talking to the thing
using human language is a possibility, but only one in many other
possiblilities. Imagine there is a very well thought "UI" that is sensing the
taps of your fingers on your forearm, or your leg, or whatever part of your
body is easily accessed. Imagine you can give "input" to your glasses by
drawing shapes on your blue jeans, or tapping little rythmic commands, "tap-
tap-tap" is cancel, "slide-left" is next, "draw a round" is repeat, etc. I
think this could be worth trying.

