
Google is also one of the best examples of a company taking the second avenue: free up more time for people who already have internet. Their push into self driving car technology has a lot of potential benefits for humanity, but it also does something fundamental for Google and their business model. Time spent in the car is a vast untapped reserve of human attention. If your daily commute isn’t filled with trivial things like watching the road and trying not to kill people you suddenly have a lot more time to search — and be served search ads. Building a self driving car may seem like extreme measures just to free up people’s time, but it’s really just the tech equivalent of fracking — Oil’s extreme attempt to unlock untapped reserves.
…ellme (now head of search at Google), had taught me about the power of first principles in science. First principles are not opinions. They are immutable facts, which, once known, can be built upon to enable further discoveries.