From WXXI news.

This is connections I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection is made at the moonshot factory.

The moonshot factory was set up to go find big problems confronting humanity, and then find audacious solutions to benefit humanity.

And to be fair, to create sustainable businesses in the process.

The moonshot Factory is part of alphabet, the parent company of Google.

The moonshot factory has been around for about 15 years, aiming to follow a three step model.

Number one, identify a huge problem in the world that you want to solve.

Number two, envision some kind of science fiction sounding product or service that, if it were possible, if it were real, could help solve the problem.

And then number three, determine that there might be a realistic chance to make that science fiction happen.

Some things that have come out of the moonshot factory that you might already know about Google Brain, for example, wing the drone for package delivery.

They're working on a moonshot for the energy grid.

And now in cities like San Francisco, Waymo can show up with a driverless car and give you a ride.

I admit that when I began reading about Waymo earlier this week, I was a skeptic.

But it is happening.

And so when you look at moonshots, big problems, big solutions, how realistic is it that big tech is going to make our lives better into the future?

If you are a cynic or a skeptic about AI, this conversation, I think, is for you.

Astro Teller is the captain of moonshots at X the factory, the moonshot factory at alphabet, and if your name is Astro Teller, you got to have to be a big deal.

Teller is a huge deal in the world of tech.

He believes in the power of tech to make lives better.

He's in Rochester as a guest of RIT keynote, the academic convocation tomorrow.

But first, only the Pope could shorten the hour for Astro Teller.

Welcome, Astro teller.

Thank you for having me, Ivan Habiamos.

Astro.

Astro, welcome to the program.

And it's, It's great to have you.

Bob Finnerty is associate vice president of communications at RIT.

Welcome back.

Bob, nice to see you in studio.

Thank you, Ivan, and I'm not going to make Lisa Chase do a lot of talking because it's going to be a short an hour.

I just want to recognize and welcome the vice president Secretary of university for it.

And thank you for being here as well, Lisa.

Thank you as well.

Bob.

Just tell people what's going on with the convocation tomorrow.

Oh, we're excited.

We have about, 4500 graduates out of our 80.

And that just doesn't include Henrietta.

That includes our graduates from campuses in Kosovo and Croatia and Dubai, as well as China.

So tomorrow, big day, big deal on campus.

How did you get Astro Teller?

Well, to be honest, we have a great connection with one of our board of trustees.

His name is Kevin Surace.

And Kevin, is an entrepreneur out in the Silicon Valley who also actually has moved to Rochester.

he's originally from Syracuse.

And, so, basically, Kevin goes back and forth between Silicon Valley and Rochester, and we love the tech connection.

So I have to shorten my notes here because there's so much I want to talk about with Astro.

But Bob knows I'm I'm just going to go straight to what I really want to know.

We just saw one of the most traditional ceremonies in the world, the introduction of a new pope.

The white smoke.

No tech inside the conclave.

so let me ask you a very nontraditional question.

At this point in your career, what percentage chance do you give it that we're living in a simulation 0000.

And can I say, I would argue that white smoke is the technology on two fronts?

First of all, fire might be one of the first 2 or 3 technologies that humanity sort of got its its head, its arms around and choosing to communicate with the color of smoke is absolutely a technology.

So interesting that you would use that as an example when those are actually two human technologies.

No chance for living a simulation.

None.

No, not even 1%?

No.

Why do you feel that way?

Occam's razor.

I don't see any evidence that we're living in the simulation, and I don't very well designed, and I.

And I don't see any argument for why it would be to our benefit, the matrix, which is certainly not the first, example of people bringing this up.

It goes back at least to Descartes.

But, most people understand this or thinking about it through the sort of the matrix repot popularized this idea.

That's just silly.

Humans are not very good batteries.

There's no obvious reason that we or anyone else would benefit from us being in a simulation that I, I that's ever been presented to me.

So Occam's Razor says we're not living in a simulation.

Okay.

I think I'm going to get on board with that idea now, as the captain of moonshots at X, you guys are trying to solve big, big problems.

In a moment, I want to ask about the energy grid.

That's a big one.

But in general, when when people are getting to know your work, I mean, it's did I describe it pretty well?

You're trying to solve big problem in audacious ways.

That's right.

You're three step like huge problem with the world science fiction sounding product or service breakthrough technology.

Once you have something that has those three elements, it is a moonshot story hypothesis at X and then high five.

Great for you.

If you work at X now, you're probably wrong, because anything that sounds unlikely is we need in order to even consider doing it means it has a at best 1 in 10, probably more like a 1 in 100 chance of being right.

So I need you now to practice intellectual honesty.

If you're working at X, how fast, how efficiently can you verify that you're wrong, that this is not a once in a generation opportunity for humanity so we can throw it away and get on to the next one.

That's the sort of basic muscle at X by the way.

You keep saying X, and listeners may be thinking of Elon Musk's X.

Do you want to clarify?

Sure.

I mean, we've been we started our history 15 years ago as Google X, and we're known that way until alphabet came into being.

But since we were never really a part of Google, we were always sort of functionally a little sister to Google.

And that became official once alphabet was created.

The holding company, that Google is the main but not only part of now what was Google X?

Now X is a little sister to Google.

Inside that holding company we are the moonshot factory.

So we've been X for a very long time.

So when I think about your model, the framework driverless cars listeners might think, well what problem does that solve?

The problem I think, is human beings are terrible drivers.

Amen.

And a lot of people die needlessly because we are distracted or we are drinking or we are tired and, and but I also will tell you, Astra, that ten years ago we did a program looking 25 years in the future, 2040 and driverless cars were a big part of the conversation then.

And then we've seen other iterations in other companies and they haven't gone very well.

So I wasn't up to speed until the last week when Bob sending me these notes on like Waymo.

Is that like a thing.

So and then I'm reading and I want to read a little bit of a review of Waymo, if you don't mind.

This comes from drew McGarry.

Listeners might know him.

Former Deadspin columnists.

Now he's writing in San Francisco, and he took a Waymo ride last year, which is there's not even a driver.

There's like a backup driver in the car.

The car picks him up.

Take some more.

He needs to go.

No one in the front seat, no one in the front seat.

And he writes the following quote.

We've had to spend the past two decades listening to the people in charge of technology spewing spew bull crap.

They all make grandiose promises about their products, not because they actually want to change the world, but they want to boost their company.

Speculative values.

Elon Musk became the richest man on earth this way, and I would trust Glenn Maxwell to babysit my kids.

Before I believed a single word coming out of that guy's mouth.

This is an industry built on over promising the future and then un delivering end quote.

And then he takes the ride.

And here's what he concludes.

Quote I liked Waymo so much better than Uber or Lyft that I would never use those two apps again if I could only use Waymo.

All of my friends and colleagues who have used Waymo feel similarly, end quote.

And he admits he couldn't believe how good it was.

So for the people who are like, well, I gave up on driverless cars.

Waymo is it's it's in San Francisco.

I'm sure it's another places.

Is this solving the problem?

Is it is this like ready for market everywhere?

Yeah.

It'll take a while to roll out.

But we're giving rides in San Francisco in Austin, in Phoenix and in Los Angeles.

We've already announced that DC Atlanta, Tokyo I think are next up.

So coming to a city near you soon or that you're a part of soon.

But I just want to pause and saying, you said the description, of how innovation is perceived by the public.

I understand, I, and I wish that we were generally we the innovation industry were not leading people on as much as maybe the industry does.

Overall, we x the moonshot factory work really hard to tell people, hey, here's what we're doing.

We are trying to go over there.

We'll tell you way ahead of time where we're trying to go, partly because if that's a bad place to try to go, we want feedback from society where they say, please don't go there.

That's an important piece of feedback to us.

Then, yeah, it's what is now called Waymo.

It's it was started 15 years ago.

That's how long this takes.

They're now doing more than a quarter of a million rides per week for pay for the general public, with nobody sitting in the front seat.

But that took 15 years to get there.

That's what innovation actually is.

It is the hard work of figuring out all the details and making it sort of safe and credible.

And the hype cycles in between are sadly, a part of the process.

But I wish that the innovation industry more generally could do a better job of communicating, as I'm doing right now.

This stuff takes time.

Well, and here's another thing.

I really appreciate you seeing many of your presentations.

You talk often about why what you are trying to do will probably fail, and that that's not a bad thing, that information matters, but that's the that's the opposite of overpromising the public when you get started with something.

Thank you.

So I mean, I mean that in two senses.

First, when we start things, as I was just practicing with you a few minutes ago, we're clear that maybe 1% of the things in the very early days go on to be nearly as successful as Waymo.

So that is just the physics of innovation.

And to deny that is to B.S.

yourself and B.S.

the public, both of which are bad, then it's also the case within a moonshot that there is so much to be learned, and you have to have audacity and humility in equal amounts.

If you don't have a lot of audacity, you won't go try something that really might make the world radically better, but then you'll sort of smoke too much of your own product.

If you don't have equal amounts.

Humility, you need to go into it.

Really curious.

Am I doing this right?

Is this actually helping humanity in the ways that we thought?

So Waymo.

In the early days thought it was making a self-driving car until we got Googlers, people who worked at Google but not at X into these cars using them for their commute.

And we said, please, we've got cameras in the cars.

You have to swear to us you will keep your hands right by the steering wheel while you're commuting to and from work because it's, you know, we want to be really safe.

And they said, oh, yeah, give me a car.

I promise.

They were in the back seat.

They were sleeping.

They were, you know, eating, putting on makeup.

We had to stop that experiment early and we we could have said we have failed entirely, but we did.

What we did say instead was, oh, we aren't making a self-driving car.

That is human.

As back up to the system, we are transforming mobility.

Our job is to take people from point A to point B, and the human is a passenger.

So we used this failure, this learning moment to transform Waymo rather than to stop the project.

And because our hour is shortened, and I just wanted to go over so many different things you're working on and I won't have time.

Let me just direct listeners attention to the energy grid.

I've heard you talk a little bit about this.

Can you tell people what you've been doing with the moonshot on scalability and the speed of the grid change?

I'm happy to, if people are interested in hearing more and they go to Google and they just type moonshot Factory Moonshot podcast, we have a whole series out now which dives into some of these things, like self-driving cars and our moonshot for the electric grid so people can learn right there.

The electric grid is the world's largest, most complex, and most expensive machine.

It was cobbled together over the last like 120 years.

Nobody knows where all the wires are.

If you go to an actual grid operator and these are smart, hardworking people, they're not dumb.

But because of how it came together, they literally don't know where all the wires are, where that's all the transformer.

They know where the transformers are, but all the inverters are.

It is a very, very complex system.

And so what our moonshot set out to do about six years ago was to figure out how to take a lot of very disparate information, including what the grid operators themselves have, but also what you can get from drones, from Street View, cars, from satellites, every kind of information you could get, and then use induction and deduction tools from artificial intelligence to figure out what the system diagram of the grid is.

for example, we just announced a large partnership with PJM, which is the sort of overarching grid operator kind of superstructure for the East Coast of the United States.

And so we're starting to do this with them.

And then once you have this circuit diagram for the grid, then you can start helping them to manage the grid as it currently is.

How do you take care of on a day to day basis to how do you plan for the future of the grid?

Which is a very gnarly problem, which is a lot of why the grid is when you hear in newspapers about it's not working.

A lot of that is because planning for the future so hard and we're behind literally by 8 or 9 years.

I can explain that if you want.

And then ultimately, the grid really wants to become a marketplace for electrons, but you have to have the intellectual, the, the digital plumbing set up first before that's possible.

So I can't wait.

We're going to talk in one, three, five years, and we're going to find out how fast the grid is changing.

Will you come back and talk about the I'm happy to and I want to ask Bob before we go here in this truncated hour here, can the public access any of what's going on tomorrow, see some of the remarks?

Things like that?

Yeah, we'll have things streamed off the homepage.

And then for sure, I would love for Astro to tease out, if he can, just a little bit about what he might be telling to the students tomorrow.

All right, 45 seconds.

Give us that preview.

Since we were five years old, all of us and all of the graduates tomorrow have had beaten into them the necessity for performance.

And very slowly, over time, we lose a lot of our joy, some of our humanity.

We lose most of our playfulness and with it, most of our creativity.

All in the name of getting short term tangible.

I got an A-plus on the test.

Hey, boss.

Look, I did my report.

Pat me on the head.

Give me a bonus.

Give me a promotion.

And something profound has been lost in the process.

And I'm going to tell the graduates that there's a different way that I think we'll make them happier and more successful at the same time.

thank you, Bob, for facilitating this.

It's nice to see you as always here.

Thank you.

And, I listeners, again, the reason we were truncated is there is a new post we were waiting for the the presentation from Leo the 14th.

NPR will have much more on that.

But Astro, I really appreciate you taking the time to come in here and share what you guys are doing at the Moonshot Factory.

Good luck to you.

Solve big problems.

Let us know how it's going.

Thank you very much for having me.

Thank you for being here.

Great having you.

thank you for being here as well.

It's just great to have you and listeners.

We're back with you tomorrow on member supported public media.

Oh.

This program is a production of Sky Public Radio.

The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of this station, its staff, management or underwriters.

The broadcast is meant for the private use of our audience, any rebroadcast or use in another medium, without expressed written consent of Sky is strictly prohibited.

Connections with Evan Dawson is available as a podcast.

Just click on the connections link at WXXI news.

Org.