The Moonshot Factory 38:38

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You've seen some really compelling demos here. They were slick. They were robust. This is going to be nothing like that. This can go wrong in about 500 different ways. So tell me now, who wants to see a demo of Glass?

This is Sergey Brin in 2012. He's live at Google's largest developer conference in San Francisco, leading a theatrical demo of Google Glass. It's unlike anything anyone's seen before. The unit I actually really want to show you, I lent to a friend, and he's going to be here momentarily. At this point, a huge video is projected behind Sergey showing a flying white airship.

Turns out Sergey's friend JT is in that airship. Then a new video pops up, a feed of JT, who was wearing odd-looking glasses and a wingsuit. Can you hear me? Yeah, yeah. I was hoping to maybe get that unit I lent you down here, and I thought maybe you guys could show us a fun time on the way down.

The video switches to JT's view of the city below, because JT is live streaming with his Google Glasses. And then, the doors of the airship open. All right. Whoa, San Francisco! And they're under canopy, chutes are open. What you just heard is the sound of a relieved tech founder.

Soon enough, the roof of the auditorium shows up in JT's view. There's a big yellow arrow on it, and he lands. "Yeah, that was awesome, guys. Woohoo! Alright, that was pretty amazing." You know, I remember sitting at my desk at the time, watching the stream just out of curiosity, and thinking, "What the hell is up with these Google guys?"

Really, it's hard to overstate how wild this was. Google wasn't a flashy company. It wasn't known for its epic product announcements like, say, Apple. But on that stage, as you can hear, Sergey Brin was straight up giddy. Probably in part because he hadn't live streamed anyone's death, but also because by all accounts, Google Glass was his passion project. He was so enthusiastic about it, it was kind of infectious. From watching that demo, it felt a lot like Glass could be the next iPhone.

Of course, that is not what happened. Little did Sergey know, the demo was basically the height of Google Glass' success. And over the next couple years, his passion project would become one of Google's biggest failures. This is Land of the Giants. I'm Alex Kantrowitz. And I'm Shereen Ghaffari. And this is the Moonshot episode.

Practically every tech giant likes to take big bets on new inventions. I mean, why not, right? They're like high rollers at a casino. They can afford to go big on the slight chance they hit the jackpot. But even among these Silicon Valley spenders, Google takes betting to the next level.

You've heard about some of Google's more pragmatic bets like Chrome, Android, and YouTube. Well, as Google got bigger and more powerful, its pragmatic decisions turned into seemingly outlandish investments. Because Google wasn't David anymore, looking just around the corner to get ahead of the next forefront in computing. As a Goliath, Google could look 10 or 20 years ahead.

When Google snaps into that mindset, it kind of travels back in time, back to its early spirit, when Larry and Sergey would sit on the floor using Legos to imagine a techno-utopian future where all information is accessible. Over a decade later, Larry and Sergey could play with more than just Legos to pursue those visions. They could throw almost endless resources into their pure imagination. So in this episode, we're going to tell the story of two of Google's more utopian inventions.

These two ideas were born from a desire to find the next big innovation in technology, the next search. One is Sergey's passion, and the other is Larry's. And both show us Google's vision for the future and its potential shortcomings. Company stories are often lived through individuals, through people who do the work and mostly stay outside the headlines. For Google's moonshots, that person is Sebastian Thrun. Yeah, I mean, if you're at the forefront of computing, you almost certainly have to ask yourself,

How is computing evolving? Thrun is all the things you would expect from a visionary leader at Google. He's ambitious, audacious, and he came from Stanford. Back in 2009, Thrun was a tenured professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Google's alma mater. Look, tenure is in some way the most boring thing on the planet. It's basically the story of the rest of your life told right there.

Tenure at Stanford sounds pretty sweet to me, but Thrun was yearning for a more adventurous ambition. His dream wasn't initially wearable tech, though. Actually, his career had basically been about chasing another frontier in computing, self-driving cars. I have a personal reason to work on self-driving cars. When I was 18, I lost my best friend and neighbor to a traffic accident. It was one of these things where...

They took their dad's car on a spin. It was icy and they slammed into a big truck. And he and his friend were instantly dead. And that felt such a waste. It felt such a, like a split-second bad decision is going to end a human life. A split-second bad decision that a self-driving vehicle might not have made.

Thrun wanted to make the world safer. And his passion for self-driving is what eventually got him to Google. Because it was at a self-driving competition in the Mojave Desert where Thrun and Larry Page crossed paths. The Dapper Challenge was like a Woodstock for robo-geeks.

DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It's part of the Department of Defense. The U.S. military has long been interested in self-driving vehicles, because if you could move military supplies and cargo into combat zones without human drivers, you could save lives. The thing is, the military needed help developing that technology. So, back in the early aughts, DARPA funded something called the Grand Challenge.

The idea now was that if you can drive 140 miles through the Mojave Desert, the course we give you, the course that resembles the desert trails in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then you win. In 2005, Thran and his Stanford team came in first and got a cool $2 million. I had won the DARPA Grand Challenge and many people believed I was like the world authority on self-driving cars. Including Larry Page, another robotics nerd.

Back when Larry started his PhD at Stanford, one of the science fiction ideas he brought up to Terry Winograd, his advisor, was self-driving cars. But he didn't have the resources, namely the highly specialized and costly engineering talent to really go after it. Over time, though, Larry gained a superpower, Google's massive profits. Profits he could use to fund the best and brightest engineers like Thrun to build out his visions and keep Google ahead of the next frontier in computing.

The DARPA Mojave Desert Robo Geek Fest was a recruiting event for Larry to find that talent. He was known to show up incognito, unannounced, to scope out the latest crop of engineers. And Larry came to me and said, look, Sebastian, it's so cool. Why don't we build a car that can drive in the middle of San Francisco? As ambitious as Thrun was, thinking about his desert vehicle in a city made him nervous. Some of them, like, they ran into walls, right, and collided with stuff.

In the middle of San Francisco, possibly with all the kids playing, sounded daunting to me. So I said, look, to be realistic, we can't do that. Not words Larry Page loves to hear. So Thrun says Larry just kept asking him. And it elevated me to the point of anger. I would say, no, goddamn, it can't be done. I'm the world expert. It can't be done.

Then, Theron says, Larry changed tactics. He said, fine, it can't be done. But can you just give me the technical explanation of why it can't be done? I just want to tell my co-founder, Sergey, and CEO, Eric Schmidt. I literally went home in agony. I couldn't articulate a technical reason. I could just say I knew for a fact it can't be done, but I couldn't back it up with any argument. So I came back the next day and said, look, Larry, I don't know why it can't be done. I'm sure it can be done. And Larry said, look,

There's a 10% chance it's feasible. We can build a company that's bigger than Google. Just do it. And that sold me on it.

In 2009, Theron started Google's self-driving car project. And he agreed to quite the goal with Larry and Sergey. We called it the Google 1000 or the Larry 1000. To drive 1,000 miles on actual roads in an autonomous vehicle. And not just any kind of roads. The founders set and tried to, on Google Maps, find the most challenging roads you could possibly drive. So there were, like, downtown San Francisco, down Lombard Street. There were...

crossing the Bay Bridges. There was Highway 1 all the way to Los Angeles. You would drive around Lake Tahoe in the mountains.

Yeah, I was one of the people who started this whole mess in 2009. Dmitry Dalgov was one of the first recruited to Google to achieve the Larry 1000. He had been part of Thrun's Stanford DARPA teams, and he too was struck by the power of Larry's vision. He is very, very good at seeing how things should be.

and what's possible, what should be possible, and then tries to make it so. But sometimes the technology is just not there. Sometimes technology and the world is a little behind Larry's vision. When you got into a self-driving car for the first time, how convinced were you that you weren't going to die? Very convinced.

These guys didn't approach every ride with fear. Dolgov and Thrun trusted their own code. The biggest challenge was the small street in Tiburon that fits exactly one car but has traffic in both directions. And the people who live there, they back into driveways when there's oncoming traffic. And so we had to kind of find a way around it. We weren't able to drive backwards at the time just because we had an instrument in the cars to do backwards driving. So we had to find a way around this without ever having to back up. That was really hard.

But the team pulled it off. It was insane. Within about a year and a half, I went from, oh, it can't be done to, oh, we just did it. The team drove or non-drove their 1,000 miles. And the achievement was sort of a revelation for Thrun. It just really was one of these life lessons that you get even in more advanced life where you're

You've been taught all your life that by the skeptics in the world, it can't be done, whatever it is. And I can tell you as a German, I'm particularly involved in this because all of Germany says all the time it can't be done. And then this guy or these people come along from a different planet and they say it can be done. Just do it. And it wasn't just limited to cars that was thrown just getting started.

Like the rest of Silicon Valley, Thrun was thinking about phones. And while having a computer in your pocket was cool, there was still an annoying problem. You still had to reach into your pocket to get it. - So I wanted to build a computer that basically seamlessly interfaces with your brain. - Thrun said he actually talked to scientists about how to build a brain implant, but... - I came up with the conclusion

Since science was lagging behind his vision, Thrun had to settle for a computer you could wear close to your brain. Around 2010, a small exclusive team within Google came up with Google Glass.

My vision when we started Google 15 years ago was that eventually you wouldn't have to have a search query at all. You would just have information come to you as you needed it. And this is now, 15 years later, sort of the first form factor that I think can deliver that vision when you're out and about on the street talking to people and so forth. Sergey would become the public face of Glass. This is from a TED talk he gave after Glass was released.

It gives you insight into his vision for the product. As Sergey put it, Google Glass could be the ultimate search engine, a product that could seamlessly connect you to all the world's information, which meant it would have to fit a lot of tech into a very small thing.

Google Glass was an absolutely technological marvel. This was basically a full PC on your head. A full PC that looked and felt like a pair of glasses, except that when you wore it, you had a tiny clear rectangle hovering over one of your eyes. That was the display. That's what would show you information, like a tiny phone screen held right up to your face. And all the computing power of Glass was tucked away behind your ear in a slim casing.

The idea was you could use Glass for anything you'd use a phone for. Directions, taking pictures, texting, and you'd control it with your voice and motion commands. My first impressions of Google Glass was I was honestly just amazed from a technical perspective of what they'd managed to pull off. Christina Warren was a tech reporter at the time for Mashable. She was in the audience when Sergey led that skydiving promo, and she was impressed. Marketing glitz aside, Sergey's vision felt compelling.

Warren actually agonized over whether she'd buy a pair of Glass or a new laptop, which cost around the same amount. Glass went for $1,500. But Warren faced another challenge in getting a pair, beyond cost. Because Glass was released in 2012 as an exclusive beta product, Sergey wanted to develop it with user feedback. So to get a pair of Glass, you had to apply to be part of a thing called the Explorer program.

Even if you had the money to buy it, it wasn't a guarantee that you would. There had been like a reservation system. It was, you know, kind of akin to trying to get a PlayStation 5 in 2021 to try to get Google Glass back then. This creation of exclusivity around Glass was one of Google's first doomed mistakes. Even though Sergey clearly envisioned Glass as a product that could connect the world, Google seemed to really lean into Glass as a status symbol. On Fashion Week, we

We revealed Google Glass to the world. Google partnered with luxury designer Diane von Furstenberg to feature Glass on the runway at New York Fashion Week in 2012.

In the finale of the DVF show, a bunch of models sported different colored glasses. Von Furstenberg herself closed out the show wearing a custom red glass. And as she went, she reached for Sergey's hand in the front row. In a sharp suit and his own pair, obviously, Sergey walked the runway with her. Culturally, this was a major departure from Google's sandals and shorts-wearing collegiate office vibes. Google was going high fashion.

In hindsight, Glass had a confusing marketing strategy. On the one hand, it was trying to be chic and high society. On the other, it was mostly used by bonafide tech nerds. There was a Tumblr that someone created called white men wearing glass.tumblr.com or something like that. And that was because at that point, it was a product that was very much a male product, at least in terms of the people who had adopted it. And so that became kind of the joke.

A joke Google was not in on. Google Glass quickly became what biometric sleep tracking rings are now. A thing that signified the gulf between what the world thinks is cool and what tech nerds think is cool. Kara Swisher, co-founder of Recode, said she saw this coming before Glass was even released at a Google Christmas party. And everybody had Google Glass on. No one had seen it, really, in the wild. And they all were wearing it. And I didn't have one, obviously. What Swisher did have, very good food and an evening show. So there was like a pile...

like a pile of shrimp, like a giant mountain of shrimp. And I sat there eating these giant delicious shrimp while all these people with Google Glass were talking to each other. Like they were, except they were trying, they kept saying, okay, Google, and it would turn on other people's headsets. And I thought, what a bunch of idiots. It was like, it was comical to watch these people try, like move into the future. And it didn't work at all.

What Kara Swisher knew before Glass released became much, much clearer to the world in early 2013.

I mean, to me, you can kind of count the beginning of the downfall of Google Glass with Robert Scoble in the shower with Google Glass. Robert Scoble is a tech evangelist and author. We should note, in recent years, Scoble has faced sexual misconduct allegations. Before those allegations became public, back in the days of Glass, Scoble was a fixture in the San Francisco tech scene. And one day he posted a picture of himself wearing his pair of Glass to his Google Plus account.

Okay, so just imagine, you know, a middle-aged white guy, blonde hair, in the shower. His hair is kind of slicked back, and he's wearing Google Glass, and he's staring into the camera, and he just has his mouth open, kind of shrieking with excitement. And that kind of changed things, I think, from this is this futuristic kind of concept that could be really cool in the future of computing to this is this thing that nerds wear, and not just nerds, but like

the type of nerds that you don't necessarily like to be associated with. There was a word for this kind of nerd, the glasshole. At first, it was sort of a joke, but then it became more serious. More than just out-of-touch tech bros, people started to think of glassholes as creeps with cameras balancing on their noses. You can wear it, and then you can Google everything about a person in real time.

Safiya Umoja Noble is the co-founder and co-director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry with another scholar named Sarah T. Roberts. Noble and Roberts became close in grad school, in part through their joint passion for interrogating how technology can deepen inequity, which is exactly the lens they took to Glass when it came out. Because to them, Google Glass was not a product of convenience and accessibility. It was surveillance.

Glass reminded Noble and Roberts of this concept called the panopticon. Here's Sarah T. Roberts. So the panopticon is actually a kind of an architectural conceit.

Picture a rotunda-style building with a tower in its center, perfectly positioned to let anyone in that tower see everything else in the building. So the experience of being in the panopticon, outside that center, is the experience of constantly being watched. Basically to have the invisible eye on one at all times. Invisible being the key idea here.

You can't see into the tower if you're on the outside. The panopticon design was thought up by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late 1700s, and he actually envisioned its use as a prison, with people of power in the center directing the invisible eye. Noble and Roberts linked the panopticon to glass in their paper called Through Google Colored Glasses. To them, having glass was like getting access to the panopticon tower. The person puts the glass on,

and then has the ability to sort of scan the environment, move through the environment in a way where that person is seeing externally, but others without Glass don't have the same ability to look back. If you had Google Glass, you could move through the world with immediate, seamless access to information. You'd be all-seeing in a way.

Of course, Google's mission was to eventually make Glass universal, but again, in 2012, Glass was released through an exclusive, application-only process. So accessing that all-seeing power was a privilege. And to Noble and Roberts, that felt particularly dangerous.

We're acutely aware of communities that are always hyper surveilled, right? So I'm black. I come from a community in this country that has never not had our whole, you know, our movements, our ability to feel free or be free in reality tied to some type of white power structure of control or authority.

Glass seems like a technology that could supercharge that imbalance of power. And what I will tell you is that it is often working people, people who don't have a lot of power, people who have a lot at stake, who are among the first to, you know, shoot up a flare and say something's wrong here.

A lot of people shot up a flare at Glass. In March 2013, a bar in Seattle became the first of several establishments to ban Glass. And then, people who wore Glass started to experience actual harassment. In February 2014, tech writer Sarah Slocum said she was at a bar in San Francisco when someone ripped Glass off her face. Business Insider reporter Kyle Russell also said that someone ripped his pair off as he was walking in San Francisco's Mission District.

When Russell wrote about his GlassLash experience, he connected it to a larger backlash against the impact of big tech, including Google, on San Francisco. A lot of the places where GlassLash was the strongest were in major tech hubs like San Francisco and Seattle. It wasn't just about Glass. It was about what Glass symbolized, the growing gravitational pull of big tech, and a fear from so many about how that power was rearranging the world. But not all of Glass's critics were also critics of big tech.

A lot of tech nerds themselves even came to doubt Glass's potential. Glass was still a beta product, and honestly, it didn't work super well. So in January 2015, almost two and a half years after that skydiving demo, Google said it was closing its Explorers program. It didn't shut Glass down completely, but it was a recognition that it didn't have a strong future as a consumer product.

- How do you feel when you hear about Google Glass today? - It's certainly something that I made mistakes. - When we asked Sebastian Thrun about Glass's failure, he said Google made two mistakes. One, it released Glass too early before it actually worked well. And two, it marketed Glass wrong. - It should really be an outdoor, out and about, sportsy device. And we had marketed in part as an indoor device. And with using it indoors,

came all the privacy concerns that existed and so on. Maybe the glass lash wouldn't have been as intense if glass was used more like, say, a GoPro. But on the other hand, Kyle Russell was walking around outside in the Mission District when his pair was ripped away. The public's concern about glass clearly went deeper than wanting glass out of bars and restaurants. What was creepy about glass was the idea that technology was becoming so subtle, so invisible, it could look just like a pair of glasses.

It was a feeling that you were being watched all the time. But here's the thing: collecting information almost invisibly is core to many of Google's products. Like when Google released Gmail, it was scanning your emails to show you ads. And Google currently tracks your behavior across the web with its advertising products. It monitors your video consumption too, on YouTube, and then it feeds you more stuff using that data just to keep you watching.

In some ways, with Glass, Google was behind in its understanding of the public's very real concerns about digital privacy. In other ways, though, Glass was ahead of its time. Today, we're a lot more comfortable about attaching smart devices on our physical bodies. There's the Apple Watch, Facebook's Oculus, Fitbit, which Google acquired, and Apple is rumored to be working on its own consumer-wearable AR/VR headset.

The point is in all of this, Google was right that the future of consumer technology would be in wearable devices that more closely integrate computing powers with our physical bodies. It just wasn't right with glass. It wasn't right that glass could have been the next iPhone adopted by the masses. But glass is actually quietly still functioning in the world. Now there's a version of glass for the workplace. It's been used in factories across the U.S. at Boeing, DHL, and GE.

There's also some educational potential for Glass. In 2018, Stanford piloted a program for kids with autism to use Glass to better read facial expressions, with promising results. Nevertheless, Glass was a public failure for Google. But that didn't stop the moonshot factory. The company would continue to place its bets on what Google decided the world needed. And Google put more chips toward a future with self-driving cars.

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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Watch Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app to watch live. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.com.

Since the Larry 1000 about a decade ago, self-driving technology has come a long way at Google. And so has Dmitry Delgov.

I am the CTO for Waymo. Waymo is Google's autonomous driving technology company, or at least that's how it's generally known. We're not Google. Waymo is actually part of a conglomerate called Alphabet. Larry and Sergey created Alphabet in October 2015 as a parent company to Google, Waymo, and a bunch of other moonshots-turned-businesses.

You need to know two things about Alphabet. One, it meant a change in leadership for Google. This was when Sundar Pichai became Google's CEO and Larry and Sergey went off to run Alphabet. And two, Alphabet was basically the formalization of Google's moonshot culture. It was a structural change that allowed Larry and Sergey to build entirely new companies fueled by Google's resources. And with the creation of Alphabet came a new term for Google's moonshots.

From then on, businesses like Waymo would be dubbed alpha bets. This is a huge alphabet bet to go and create another Google, maybe something I would hope even bigger. It's not every day that you get a chance to transform a hundred year old trillion dollar industry. So that's the play here, Alex.

A play that Waymo would say it's well on its way to winning. Because as we speak, countless Waymo vehicles are driving autonomous, no-human-behind-the-wheel rides in Phoenix, Arizona. And our lead producer Megan Cunane got into one. Sort of. Okay. So... Our car just pulled up.

Waymo gave me the chance to join a driverless ride via Zoom. It arranged a call between me and one of their test riders. I will say, though, I really do feel like I got as close to the experience as possible. But before we get to that, you should meet the rider I virtually shadowed. My name is Ben Henderson. I live in Chandler, Arizona. Ben Henderson moved to Chandler just outside of Phoenix in 2018 with his wife and four kids.

As soon as we moved here, that was one of the first things we noticed was these cars everywhere on every street, sometimes one at each side of the intersection when you come to a traffic light. They are everywhere. My kids have this little game where when they spot one, they shout Waymo when we're out driving or whatever. It becomes a chorus of Waymo, Waymo constantly as we drive through town.

So Henderson thought, why not literally join this chorus? And he applied to be a test rider, which was actually an intense process. He says Waymo did a series of interviews with his entire family, but that made sense to him. His family was about to get access to Waymo's secret sauce. They had to be vetted. And it was worth it for Henderson because he was excited for what the experience could mean for his kids. It could mean they'd be in the front seat, or rather the back seat, of a technological revolution.

They would have to wait, though, until 2020 to get to ride in a fully empty Waymo car. So it's a white minivan, but with a big thing on top. It's like a, oh man, the nerd world is going to hate me, but what's the drone thing on Star Wars? R2-D2? The little dome-shaped thing?

But the inside of the car is really nothing special. Except, of course, for the fact that it has no driver. Oh my gosh, that's wild! It's just like the... It's like a ghost is in the front seat.

The wheel just moves. Henderson pressed a start button on an info screen on the back of the front seat, and the car just started pulling out, the wheel turning ever so slightly to get into the road. I mean, even the foot pedals were pressing up and down. The testing program, when we first joined, when the car would go down that street, you could tell it had a hard time

knowing what the cars were doing, if they were going to pull out or anything. And so it was very jerky. The ride was very jerky. Kind of shudder back and forth as it weaved in and out of these cars and hesitated a lot.

And so that is noticeably smoothed out over time. Okay, I have to ask here. Isn't he freaked out, like, at all? Not at all. Henderson said he really trusts Waymo's attention to safety. Plus, there are some precautions set up within the ride. Like, Henderson is pretty sure there's a support staff tracking him. And if the car for some reason feels overwhelmed, it's programmed to pull over.

If you feel you need to pull over or something is unsafe, then you can hit pull over and the vehicle will pull over immediately too. As soon as, you know, it's in a safe spot. Have you ever used that function? Never, never have had to at all.

I just want to notice real quick, Megan, you said when the car feels overwhelmed? I know. I feel kind of embarrassed by this, but both Henderson and I kept slipping into personifying our Waymo car, which shows you really how safe Henderson feels in there and also shows you how much I fully bought into this autonomous techno-utopian future. I mean, I get how thrilling this could feel for Google to be so close to this technological revolution.

For sure, Google's definitely come a long way from ranking web pages online for search. Though actually, one way to look at Waymo is that it is the next evolution of web search. When you use a search engine online, you typically type in your intention, what you want to do, where you want to go. And in a self-driving car, you're actually living that intention.

I mentioned this idea to Dmitry Dolgov. So in some way, I really like that analogy. In Google, you type in a question and boom, here's your answer. You're speaking to your phone and Google Assistant gives you an answer. It takes care of the task. I think of Waymo as the same way of...

Very easily expressing what you want to happen in terms of goods and people moving around, and Wayman makes that happen. Google has been tremendously successful in taking any friction out of access to information. And I think of our mission as taking all of the friction and complexity out of moving in the physical world.

But as Waymo takes the frictionless world to a new level, Google will have to deal with some of the complex ethical questions that were once theoretical to self-driving. As we recorded this episode, I couldn't stop thinking about the old trolley problem, which goes something like this. If a runaway trolley is going to run over a group of people and you can pull a lever, divert it, and ensure we'll only hit one person, do you pull it and cause this person's death? Or do you allow the trolley to follow its natural course and kill the group?

The trolley problem doesn't really offer a helpful framework for guiding the development of programming of autonomous vehicles or their decision making in the face of all of the complexity, all of the risks, all of the uncertainty and how they should deal with accidents. Now, our cars do have a model, physics based models of severity and are considering all kinds of uncertainty and probabilities of various outcomes.

- Dolgoff is basically politely telling me that this is the normie way of thinking about self-driving technology. The trolley problem, which seems like a huge ethical question to me, doesn't come close to capturing all the ethical dilemmas that Google is taking on by pursuing this project. Like, how do you measure a machine's moral judgments? How do you hold that machine accountable? What happens to the jobs of truckers who are replaced by autonomous vehicles? Are we sure that pedestrian sensors can pick up everyone's skin color?

Will this truly be accessible to anyone? Or will it be just another luxury good that only the privileged can afford? Any company that makes self-driving technology faces these questions. But not many companies are as far ahead as Google. Because Google had the power and resources to invest in its big idea early. It didn't have to deal with rounds of funding like a small startup would.

Like with its forays into desktop, mobile, video, augmented reality, Google made sure it was one of the first to the table. We told you two stories about Google's most utopian bets. But there are many more. Projects like delivering internet connectivity through beams of light, storing electricity using molten salt, and building robots that can take care of everyday tasks. This is the idealism of Google at work. It really does want to solve the world's biggest problems with technology.

And while there's real potential for Google to deliver on that ambition with something like self-driving vehicles, as you heard, sometimes Google's vision for the future doesn't line up with what people really want or need. But whether we want it or not, Google's future may well be the one we'll get. It's Google's utopia, and we're just living in it.

In Google's early years, back when Larry Sergei played out their inventions with Legos, they laid the foundation for one of the company's most important workplace values: radical transparency. Larry Sergei believed in openness and debate to move Google forward. And that foundation stayed strong for years, even as Google grew. But now it's cracking.

Next week, the story of one of Google's secrets, a controversial partnership with the Department of Defense, and what happened when the secret got out. We can't keep asking, right? Like, we can't keep asking nicely.

Land of the Giants, The Google Empire, is a production of Recode by Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Megan Cunane is the show's lead producer. Lissa Soep is our editor. Nathan Miller is our associate producer and engineer this episode. Emily Sen is our fact checker. Our theme song was composed by Gautam Shrikashen. Sam Oltman is Recode's editor-in-chief.

Art Chung is our showrunner. Nishat Kurwa is our executive producer. I'm Alex Kantrowitz. You can check out my weekly interview series, Big Technology Podcast, on your favorite podcast app. And I'm Shereen Ghaffari.

So, you know, podcasts aren't as technologically savvy as self-driving cars, and they do not review themselves. So if you liked this episode, please do leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. We'd really love to know what you think of the show and subscribe if you haven't already to hear our next episodes.