An Insight, An Idea with Sergey Brin

“First of all, let me just tell all of you that you should doubt my answers,” said Sergey Brin, Co-Founder of Google, and Founder, Bayshore Global Management, before he answered the first of many probing questions put to him by Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum. At an Annual Meeting abuzz with talk about artificial intelligence, Brin admitted to having been – until quite recently – an AI sceptic. As the head of Google X (the company’s “moon-shot” division) some years back, he said, one of the many projects he oversaw was something called Google Brain. Brin paid little attention to it, he confessed, and just didn’t think that AI would work, casually dismissing one of its lead researchers, Jeff Dean, when he came up to him and said, “Look, the computer has made a picture of a cat.”

That was in 2011. Today, he said, Google Brain touches nearly every one of Google’s main products, from core search to images to apps. To Brin, the revolution in deep neural network technology (or deep learning) illustrates just how difficult it is to forecast the future and to know the limits of the possible. Impressed with the attention visited on artificial intelligence in the Annual Meeting 2017, he joked, “Incredibly, I’m here at Davos and I feel like the Luddite in the room.”

Asked by Schwab about the potential for a biological revolution, and especially about the likely combination of a biological and digital revolution, Brin noted that he has personally invested in, and has been particularly passionate about, research into Parkinson’s disease. While recognizing that instruments like the inexpensive gene-editing technology CRISPR represent powerful new tools for biologists across all disease categories, he said that he’s interested in investing in the “lower-level layers” like machine learning, which “span the gamut of human endeavour” and therefore yield a multiplier effect.

Responding to a question about whether a new governance paradigm is needed in an age of such rapid technological advance – providing for more agile interaction between regulators, civil society and enterprises – Brin said that he was “blown away” by the level of enlightenment in conversations he’s hearing among politicians, business leaders and social entrepreneurs, adding that this kind of dialogue may well lead to not only quicker but also more collaborative ways to tackle emerging governance issues.

Brin chalked up his success with Google to the culture of Silicon Valley – a culture that doesn’t stigmatize failure and encourages risk-taking. “Look, first of all, I’m very lucky,” he said. “But the luck also comes from taking many shots, and so many failures. If I told you all my failures, we would have to have a much longer session,” he said. “We’re lucky to have an environment that tolerates lots of risk and tolerates the inevitable failures.”

Asked for a piece of advice to aspiring young entrepreneurs, Brin replied, “I would encourage young folks to take chances and pursue their dreams – and silence the voices saying, ‘There are a 1,000 start-ups doing self-riding bicycles.’”

Brin praised the ethos of the World Economic Forum, saying that a sense of social responsibility is common to many of the companies participating – something he says has animated Google from its inception. “You can’t just think narrowly about your business … that you’re just going to maximize earnings and not be concerned about what’s going on around you,” he said. “It seems to me that companies are taking these things seriously,” Brin said. “I almost feel like we’re at Burning Man, but we’re all wearing clothes."