Larry Page, Google co-founder, gave a talk at the Annual Meeting of American Association of the Advancement of Science, on 16 February. You can also watch the lecture on video if you download it in ram format. Page has not quite finished his PhD on Computer Science in Stanford yet, so he is a rookie scientist in a way besides being a mature entrepreneur. Larry’s core claim was, that “Science has a really serious marketing problem and nobody pays attention to that since none of the marketers work for science. If all the growth in world is due to science and technology and no one pays attention to you, then you have a serious marketing problem.” That’s why, he highlighted, entrepreneurship is necessary for science, and “You need to have the right attitude about it, and you need to think that business and entrepreneurship are important parts of science.” When, at the age of 6, he read the autobiography of Tesla, he cried at the end because it basically is a failure, he couldn’t fund his research, and was struggling hard to commercialize that stuff. He decided, he doesn’t want to be like Tesla, he wants a real impact, and for that the scientist needs integration with business, engineering and other areas. So Larry doesn’t really separate science and engineering, and he is absolutely right. If we, scientists really want our scientific work out there, and would like people to understand it there should be some mix between the activities. In Larry’s case it was obvious, since according to him “there is no computer science, it is just computer engineering and computer engineering is something else.”
He highlighted the early history of Silicon Valley, when in 1939, David Packard and William Hewlett established their firm in Packard’s garage with an initial capital investment of $538.
On the other hand scientific thinking hugely benefits most jobs. So at Google they try to hire a lot of scientific and tech oriented people even in positions they wouldn’t normally be on.
Additionally, scientists are really great citizens in Larry’s opinion, and he wants to have people in power, who understands things. His example was Abdul Kalam, the president of India, a rocket scientist by profession, who also apparently knows much about how Indian languages are encoded for web-display. This idea reminds me a little bit of Platon’s argument on the philosopher kings of city-states in Book VII of The Republic. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee, that an excellent scientist, who is a very smart man by definition, will naturally become a good politician. Read the rest of this entry »
