A BEAUTIFUL
MIND
Google Glasses.
Does Thrun worry that omnipresent Google Glasses will make
us more likely to disconnect from
people around us?
“All the time,” he says, explaining that he and other Google X
engineers have been wearing the
device as much as possible to see
what dinner table conversation is
like once the novelty of the gadget
has worn off. “Maybe the outcome
will be socially not that acceptable, we don’t know.”
So far, he’s felt “amazingly empowered” by the ability to take
pictures, share pictures, and
bring people into what he’s doing
at that very moment. To Thrun,
Google Glasses’ primary appeal
is as a camera. He predicts we’ll
share ten times as many photos
as we do now and that the images
we share will be “uglier”— more
personal, more authentic, and
more of the moment. These intimate images of what we’re seeing
right this instant — a baby’s face,
the steak we’re about to bite into
— will allow a kind of elementary
teleportation that lets us each
bring everyone along for the ride.
Your mind can be closer than
ever to mine.
If Google Glasses embody Th-
HUFFINGTON
8.19.12
run’s vision for a device that brings
people together, the house he’s
building near Palo Alto is a wish
for a home that does the same.
The frame of the house tops a
gold, grassy hill on a $5.9 million,
nine-acre plot of land in Los Altos
Hills. Seen from afar, it might be
mistaken for a red flying saucer
that has descended on Silicon Valley. Designed by Eli Attia, former
chief of design for Philip Johnson,
the building is a squat, singlestory cylinder with exterior walls
made entirely of floor-to-ceiling
glass. A glass cone protrudes from
the roof at the center of the circle
and directly below it, a spiral
staircase leads to a garage. Thrun
says with a touch of pride that at
5,000 square feet, the three-bedroom home is a fraction the size of
its neighboring mansions. There
are also no corridors or load-bearing walls in the floor plan, and
much of the eco-friendly home is
given over to common areas.
“It’s really compact,” Thrun
says. “The idea to make as compact as possible so family stays as
close together as possible.”
During the tour, a neighbor
stops by to ask if Thrun will join
him at this year’s Bohemian Club
retreat. Like Thrun, he’s a member of this elite society where
men—and only men—with big
checkbooks and big roles to play