Note: there has been confusion across the internet today over what Larry Page actually told the Financial Times, leading its reporter to issue clarifications over Twitter. Although the article explicitly referred “Don’t Be Evil” as “quaint,” Page was referring to Google’s official motto, about organizing the world’s information.
It looks like “Don’t Be Evil” is so over. Google CEO Larry Page confessed to the Financial Times that the 16-year-old tech behemoth has outgrown its pithy maxim. Like a hermit crab on the hunt for a new shell, Google is now presumably searching for an adequate replacement. You only need to glance at Twitter (#NewGoogleMissionStatement) to see that the internet is wasting no time in coming up with suggestions.
For the record, “Don’t Be Evil” was never Google’s prime directive as much as an internal slogan, so all those Twitter users need to start anew. Page appears to be an executive who knows every last technical detail about how his sprawling company operates. The interview conveys his steely awareness that there’s about to be a massive collision between society and Google’s enormous pile of cash. Page envisions a better world, but also a very different one (which we desperately need). He seems to realize that the changes might be so all-encompassing that it’s just no longer accurate to call Google’s methods altruistic.
Page was actually pretty candid about what he sees coming, and it truly is disruptive. But while collapsing home prices and the automation of millions of jobs seem inevitable, extended human lifespans and a phase-out of fossil fuels might never actually happen. Meanwhile Google’s idea of what’s best for humanity is pretty dubious. They wrongly thought a creepy toy like Glass would be a smash. The internet of things, designed to learn everything about you and sell it to advertisers, is hardly noble. And they paid $400 million for AI company DeepMind, a move that seems even more ominous after what Elon Musk said.
Yet Google’s power keeps growing – so much so that the entire internet erroneously assumed that “Don’t Be Evil” was the thing to go.
[Via the Financial Times; photo by Emmanuel Dunand via Getty Images]