The world is not limited by IQ. We are all limited by bravery and creativity.
Astro Teller
Moonshot thinking starts with picking a big problem: something huge, long existing, or on a global scale.
Doing exercise without monitoring yourself will be rare in the future of wearable technology.
Most of us have to spend a lot of energy to learn how to drive a car. Then we have to spend the rest of our lives over-concentrating as we drive and text and eat a burrito and put on makeup. As a result, 30,000 people die every year in a car accident in the U.S.
You make a ton of progress by making a ton of mistakes.
Here is the surprising truth: It's often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better.
Failing doesn't have to mean not succeeding. It can be, 'Hey we tried that. We can go forward, smarter.'
If you don't have a tonne of optimism, you're not going to make it... you won't be able to evangelise to everyone else. On the other hand, if you aren't constantly paranoid about what can go wrong and put plans in place, then you're going to get bitten at some point.
It comes up over and over and over again that a ten times increase in the weight-oriented density of batteries or the volume metric, the space-oriented density of batteries, would enable so many other moonshots that that's one that just constantly comes up over and over again, and we will start that moonshot if we can find a great idea.
To say a scientist is not at all responsible is wrong. But to say that someone who invents a piece of knowledge or technology is responsible for all future uses is ridiculous. It doesn't have to be that binary.
I personally have a philosophy around authenticity and vulnerability.
Rather than thinking of ourselves as a computer, and trying to give you computer-like functionality, it's better to start from the understanding that this is a pair of glasses, and say, 'How smart can we make these glasses for you?'
We need to make sure that the things we are already working on turn out to do the things we believe they can do and creating value both for the world and ultimately for Google.
If we want to help Google become something meaningfully different in the future, then that's more likely to happen if we focus on the physical world instead.
I do believe that making a factory for innovation, a moon-shot factory, is possible.
If software's the only thing in your bag of tools, I'm not going to give you great odds.
The cycling helmet can save your life, but it doesn't look good and tends to ruin your hair.
We've got rings, glasses, we wear things for armor, for protection from the elements, to signal our status to other people. And we're going to co-opt a lot of those things, where wearables are going to end up being the interface between us in the world.
VisiCalc and WordPerfect were the killer apps of their day, but Google and Facebook make them look small in comparison.
Let's make health care a meritocracy. Access to the best care goes to people who did what they could to avoid becoming ill.
Most ideas don't work out. Almost all ideas don't work out. So it's okay if yours didn't work out.
When technology reaches that level of invisibility in our lives, that's our ultimate goal. It vanishes into our lives. It says, 'You don't have to do the work; I'll do the work.'
The Explorer edition of Glass wasn't for everyone, but the Explorer program pushed us to find a wide range of near-term applications and uses for something like Glass.
It is the essence of innovation to fail most of the time.
Wouldn't it be awesome if we had a jetpack that wasn't a death trap? The problem is that it is going to be so power inefficient. I just couldn't live with that... it would be as loud as a motorcycle.
We are proposing that there is value in a totally new product category and a totally new set of questions. Just like the Apple II proposed, 'Would you reasonably want a computer in your home if you weren't an accountant or professional?' That is the question Glass is asking, and I hope in the end that is how it will be judged.
I grant that people are generally uncomfortable with how fast privacy issues are changing in the world, but Google Glass is not going to move the needle on that.
Every day, hundreds of millions of people stab themselves, bleed, and then offer, like a sacrifice, to the glucose monitor they're carrying with them. It's such a bad user interface that even though in the medium-term it's life or death for these people, hundreds of millions of people don't engage in this user interface.
Going from an error rate of 25 meters in GPS to 2.5 meters is huge. Going to 25 centimeters is going to matter just as much.
When you try to do something ten per cent better, you tend to work from where you are: if I ask you to make a car that goes 50 miles a gallon, you can just retool the engine you already have.
The great decision was the Explorer program. The thing we did not do well is that we allowed and somewhat encouraged too much exposure to the program.
Glass is the world's worst spy camera. If you want to surreptitiously take photos, I would not use Glass.
The real goal of AI is to understand and build devices that can perceive, reason, act, and learn at least as well as we can.
People text when they're meant to actually be driving. So imagine what they do when they think the car's got it under control.
Really great entrepreneurs have this very special mix of unstoppable optimism and scathing paranoia.
Anything which is a huge problem for humanity we'll sign up for, if we can find a way to fix it.
It's crazy that you have to tell your phone or your computer or your house or your car 'It's me!' hundreds of times a day. Wearables will solve that problem.
Phones would not be better if they could be cooler looking, if they could weight less, or if they could have more battery. Phones would be better if we didn't have to carry them around.
There's no point having something worn on your body - that's a big ask - unless you can give people something they really couldn't get otherwise. It has to be qualitatively better for it to be worn.
If you want to explore things you haven't explored, having people who look just like you and think just like you is not the best way.
Find some fun way to get a little more oil on your hands or mud on your boots. Sometimes, that's what it takes to take down some of the really big problems.
A ten-times increase in the weight-oriented density of batteries would enable so many other moonshots, if we can find a great idea. We just haven't found one yet.
If you're shooting to make the world 10% better, you're in a smartness contest with everyone else in the world - and you're going to lose. There are too many smart people in the world.
I think wearables in general have, as their best calling, to better understand our current state and needs and to express those back to the world.
Moonshots live in that place between audacious projects and pure science fiction.
I'm a father to four kids, so it bothers me that even though our children think big naturally, our society systematically trains them out of thinking that way.
I believe that the right thing for us to do, as much as we can and without confusing people, is to talk about how we're doing, the things that are going well but also the things that aren't going well.
Without getting into specifics, I assure you we are looking at very substantial opportunities for Loon - Google-scale opportunities.
Making a moonshot is almost more an exercise in creativity than it is in technology.
Use creativity and storytelling as your main muscle instead of smartness.
