A BEAUTIFUL
MIND
plete more than eight miles of the
course. Thrun won the first year
he competed, just 15 months after
deciding to enter the race.
Page, who professes selfdriving cars have “been a passion of mine for years,” watched
Stanley’s triumph in the Mojave
desert. Soon after, Google hired
Thrun to sire the sons of Stanley.
In 2010, Thrun helped Page and
Sergey Brin, Google’s other cofounder, launch Google X, a topsecret and closely-guarded lab
that the search giant tasked with
making the impossible possible.
The following year, Thrun relinquished his tenure at Stanford.
Xtreme engineering
Google X’s engineers are housed
in a low structure covered in
squares of dark, mirrored glass
that offer a mercury-tinted reflection of the parking lot, bikes and
trees that surround it. There are
jails less secure than this research
lab. Employees need a key card to
unlock the entrance, and then are
admitted to a small waiting area
furnished with two chairs and a
foosball table. From there, employees must swipe their badges
again to enter any of the labs
within, each door plastered with
HUFFINGTON
8.19.12
signs warning Googlers to stay
vigilant of “tailgaters.”
For a visitor, it’s like stepping
into the labs of a mad, hipster
scientist. Floors are made of concrete, wires hang from ceiling,
tubing covered in foil gleams
from the rafters and row after
row of black metal desks fill the
wide-open space. Thrun’s desk
stands in the center of a vast
space, at the end of a long row
of identical workstations. His is
tidy and spare, save for a nametag, an unopened cardboard box,
a DVD about the DARPA Grand
Challenge, a white Japanese humanoid robot and The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner’s history of Bell
Labs—AT&T’s legendary innovations incubator that won seven
Nobel prizes and helped usher in
the information age.
Thrun says he rarely reads books
(they’re “too long”), but Gertner’s
tome is particularly fitting in a
place that aspires to be the heir to
the Bell Labs throne. Its mission,
according to Thrun, is to work
on areas of innovation that have
“hard scientific challenges” and
“can influence society in a massive
way.” Thrun had considered working with the government to deploy
self-driving technology to help soldiers in the field, but the military’s
stipulation that he not publish his
results killed the collaboration. He