Sundar Pichai: evaluation

Transcript context

…It was a five-year waiting list, and we got a rotary telephone. But it dramatically changed our lives. People would come to our house to make calls to their loved ones. I would have to go all the way to the hospital to get blood test records and it would take two hours to go and they would say, “Sorry, it’s not ready. Come back the next day.”, two hours to come back. And that became a five-minute thing. So as a kid, this light bulb went in my head, this power of technology to change people’s lives. We had no running water. It was a massive drought, so they would get water in these trucks, maybe eight buckets per household. So me and my brother, sometimes my mom, we would wait in line, get that and bring it back home. Many years later, we had running water and we had a water heater, and you could get hot water to take a shower. For me, everything was discreet like that. So, I’ve always had this thing, first-hand feeling of how technology can dramatically change your life, and the opportunity it brings. I think if p(doom) is actually high, at some point, all of humanity is aligned in making sure that’s not the case, and so we’ll actually make more progress against it, I think. So the irony is there is a self-modulating aspect there. I think if humanity collectively puts their mind to solving a problem, whatever it is, I think we can get there. Because of that, I think I’m optimistic on the p(doom) scenarios, but that doesn’t mean I think the underlying risk is actually pretty high. But I have a lot of faith in humanity rising up to meet that moment. Take me through that experience, when there’s all these articles saying, ” You’re the wrong guy to lead Google through this. Google’s lost. It’s done. It’s over.” The following is a conversation with Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet on this, the Lex Fridman podcast. Your life story is inspiring to a lot of people. It’s inspiring to me. You grew up in India, whole family living in a humble two-room apartment, very little, almost no access to technology. And from those humble beginnings, you rose to lead a $2 trillion technology company. If you could travel back in time and told that, let’s say, twelve-year-old Sundar that you’re now leading one of the largest companies in human history, what do you think that young kid would say?…

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