Larry Page has a message for anyone who doubts the future that Google and others are building: "We should be optimists."
During Google's annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday, a recent law school graduate who happens to own stock in the Internet giant confessed to having lost his "sense of imagination" and asked Google's CEO whether the company is pushing us toward a dystopian future.
"From a philosophical point of view, when is Google's mission done and what will that look like? Will it be Wall-E or the Matrix or something horrible like that?" said the shareholder, who introduced himself as Eugene. "I'd like to believe in the awesome videos for Google Glass and stuff, but I was wondering if you ever sat down and thought, at the end of the day, 50, 100, 1000 years in the future: what will Google have created."
To answer the question, Page began by talking about watching the movie Tomorrowland this week (did we mention this was a shareholder meeting, by the way?).
"The reason I went to the movie is because I was interested in a version of the future that would be positive because that is so seldom portrayed in science fiction," Page told the student/shareholder. "I guess I came away from that saying it's not a very good story because it's not dark."
"I think there is a real bias," Page continued. "It's much easier to focus on the negative and stoke up fear -- all the things that could go wrong with something you don't know what it is yet. It's very hard to find positive views of the future in general. I think that's been true for a long time. Don't let that get you down.
"Any measure you make of the world, it's getting better: poverty, empowerment... everything is getting better in general, and by quite a bit. We should be optimists and be excited about all the things that we are building and contributing to the world because I think it's working."
Perhaps this line of thinking shouldn't come as too much of a surprise: this is the same Larry Page who apparently scares the bejesus out of Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk for his optimism about developing artificial intelligence. "He could produce something evil by accident," Musk is quoted as saying in a new biography.
Page wasn't the only one deflecting concerns about the futuristic technology Google is developing.
Google cofounder Sergey Brin made an impromptu and somewhat disheveled appearance at the same shareholder meeting to defend the safety record of the company's self-driving cars, noting that most of the accidents these vehicles have been involved in were the result of other drivers rear-ending the autonomous cars.
Earlier in the day, a letter from Brin was published on the Securities and Exchange Commission re-stating Google's commitment to build new technologies to help people live better lives.