Terri Griffith pointed to an item by which pointed out an interesting piece by Jon Gertner about Google-X, Google’s “moonshot” lab.
Gertner’s report describes part of their process, which is described as trying out ideas by making them fail. When they find something that they can’t break, it is a candidate to try out. Lot’s of rapid prototyping, one assumes.
This sounds like a lot of fun, though it could be pretty expensive—and certainly not guaranteed to ever find a good solution. I suspect that there are some unmentioned shortcuts, in which theory and intuition prune the field of ideas (i.e., it is not a random search).
Much of the article is about the corporate philosophy of what the X Lab is supposed to do. They are concerned with gadgets (not IT, which is another division of Google), problems that impact millions of people, and solutions that are nearly within reach. Oh, and it’s supposed to be science fiction-y. Notably, there is no pressure to achieve near term profits.
Contrary to Gertner’s assertion, this lab is hardly unprecedented. Both corporate and academic labs used to operate this way in the past. This is what DARPA used to do so very well.
Unfortunately, academic funding has dried up, and corporations have turned to short term targets, often based on mining open academic research. No matter how smart and creative my bright students may be, I can’t give them 10 years of ample funding to shoot the moon.
Apparently Google can.
(Editorial comment: Google’s profits, of course, are built on the “moon shot” of my generation, the Internet. We had this great idea, called “open source”, which we gave away for free. You’re welcome.)
We only know of four concepts that have made it through the vetting process and are discussed in public: Balloon-born wi-fi, Glass, self-driving automobiles, and glucose monitoring contact lenses. Evidently, space elevators were shelved as infeasible.
OK, let’s see.
Glass is not original, merely incremental. And a really bad idea. I’ve complained several times (here, here, here, etc).
Self-driving cars. Doesn’t solve any problem that public transit can’t solve already, while employing workers. Also very iffy legally.
Glucose monitoring contacts. Don’t know if this is a good idea or not. Clearly not original, unless there is something here I don’t know about.
Flying Wi-fi. If it works, it solves a problem Google cares about. Does not seem to be especially useful for urban settings. Seems wasteful and litters the public skies with Google junk.
It’s not obvious that any of these things is a solution to an important problem, or ever will be. I guess time will tell.
What should we learn from X Labs. Honestly, the process isn’t that different from many other design labs, except they have really deep pockets and management that doesn’t care exclusively about short term results. (The latter no doubt is easier to do if you have the former.)
We don’t know yet if anything valuable will emerge. So far, the results look pretty “evil” to me. But we’ll see.
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