Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

Absolutely. The goal should be to enact a vector of a new paradigm, as proactive team players synergize an out-of-the-box strategy of functionality and infotainment, re-engineering the learning curve framework of your dotted-line relationship.

http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/18/finally-the-war-on-aging-ha...

Let's just go ahead and pump the brakes here before we start clapping each other on the back and talking about shifted paradigms. I'll gladly join in the happy-clappy fest once some actual results come through. But saying we've catalyzed a shift in the world's thought paradigm (that is a really pretentious way of saying "this might make people think differently", by the way) at the announcement of a new product might be just a wee bit premature.

It is a moral imperative to make sure that short-sighted class warfare does not cut off the nose to spite the face by destroying this work under the guise of egalitarianism, because we can not turn on a dime and immediately grant it to everyone on day one. Yes, the rich will get it first. We need to ensure that market mechanisms remain functional and that they end up subsidizing the research the rest of us need. If we build gates and walls, they'll just end up captured in a heartbeat. Don't let them be built.

(Once the market has chewed on it and made it as cheap as possible, consider subsidizing it or something, but for the love of Life itself, don't break the market and destroy the research before it even happens. Seemingly suboptimal situations may need to be relatively briefly tolerated to make sure this happens at all.)

On the labour/production side a technology seems to be creating wider income gaps. For the winners it is a lever with which to create more wealth. For others, they are competing with machines and poor countries (enabled by technology to work with rich ones) for work.

On the product consumption side, the gap is pretty small. The cheap netbook that almost anyone in Europe or the US can afford is not much different (in price or performance) from the one used by a billionaire. No matter how rich you are, you can't get a better smartphone than the models you can see in any bus. Even the low end (50-$100) smartphones are getting decent. I expect smartphones to be as ubiquitous as dumb ones soon, that means the gap between rich British & bangladeshi (measured in smartphone wealth) is plummeting.

Who knows what future waves of technology will look like, especially medical technology.

I think the appropriate response is keep an open mind and see where stuff takes us. Don't bind your thinking to past paradigms. Go read the Communist Manifesto. Realize how it is a product of its time, the industrial revolution. It takes a lot of contortion to try understanding the world by that paradigm. For Adam Smith, technological efficiency was about making pins.

I always feel modern medicine should focus on raising life quality for as long as we are alive, rather than extending life itself. But of course this view is painted by the large number of old people living in inhuman conditions we currently have.

Accelerate existence by whatever means necessary; availability will follow.

That future is now. We already have first-world countries with medical technology that allows its citizens to live an average lifespan much longer than those in countries where such tech is unavailable. Not to mention the everyday technologies that indirectly extend "effective" lifespan -- every hour not spent gathering cooking fuel, preparing food, washing clothes, etc. is an hour you can spend "living". Even in said first-world countries, there is a dichotomy: those who are rich & influential enough to take advantage of expensive & cutting-edge medical treatment, and those who are not.

Actual life extension therapies are just the above, writ large. I don't see any difference between this tech and any other "early adopter" tech, which is always expensive and limited in availability. We can only hope that such technology will become cheaper & more widespread and trickle down to the rest of us in time for us to make use of it.

How else would they do it?

Imagine you have two groups of people: Group A and Group B. You are voting on a technology that can prevent 90% of deaths in Group A. Do you vote yes or no?

If you vote no, congratulations, you just condemned a large group of people to continue dying for the sake of egalitarianism.

(The reason this thought experiment is powerful is that it strips the scenario of value-judgments such as "elite" and "poor.")

Bill Gates is saving thousands of lives by trying to wipe out diseases that generally affect poor people for very little money per life saved. While in the US millions is spent per person to provide longer lives for a few people.

1 - http://who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/ 2 - http://www.who.int/cardiovascular_diseases/publications/glob... There are tons of statistics at http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.CODWORLD?lang=en for the full picture.

I guess this fixes that.

You're probably right. But any advantages in medicine eventually will boost available level of tools to all. Well it worked as this so far. Elite is just able to get the best much earlier - but that doesn't mean we should stop all scientific progress and reset to the level of medicine everybody can get.

That is how all products first become available. The rich fund the R&D and scaling.

We'd all still be living in primitive civilizations if your approach ruled the day.

Aubrey de Grey believes they are not different.

If he's right, the only way you could keep people perfectly healthy up to age 80 without them living much longer would be to execute on his plan (or a similar one), and then kill people once they got old enough.

Google believes in capitalism. They will offer goods and services to people who can afford them, and they will also work to make their products more accessible to those with limited resources.

I personally believe Android will have enormous long-lasting positive impacts on the rest of the world. A $25 smartphone ... A $10 smartphone... A $5 smartphone... Giving access to instant communication, and huge amounts of information, will in the long run dramatically improve human lives. My personal opinion.

They aren't mutually exclusive goals; working on the social/political/distributional problems that prevent most people from having a high quality of life is not exclusive with working on the health technology problems that mean that no one is living 150+ years.

And I'd rather see a high quality of life for everyone on Earth for 150+ year life spans than either of your options.

They might have different opinions or frustration with the competition, but most of what they focus on is not letting the company die from the inside. i.e: AOL/Palm/HP/Netscape couldn't innovate and imploded.

Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board up until the day shareholders (implicitly) deemed it to be a conflict of interest. I'm sure he was a great asset for Apple learning the importance of internet services. It's a shame that short-sighted investors are too captivated by competition to realize how cooperative Silicon Valley really is. There are only a handful of situations in tech where crushing your competition is actually a positive strategic move.

The rising tide floats all boats.

[1] http://business.time.com/2013/09/18/google-extend-human-life...

Steve Jobs, for example, had billions of dollars, had his genome sequenced, and probably tried very hard not to die so young. I bet if he had known 10 years earlier that he was going to die from pancreatic cancer, some of that money would have gone into searching for a cure.

Larry Page might live a perfectly healthy life, die in his sleep at 101, out living most of us. However, if you've got that kind of money and influence, why not buy some real insurance.

The capital us youngins have is time and ability if not money. This is a great example of moguls and companies willing to put that resource in given an availability of the talent and ability.

In many areas and locals, not necessarily Silicon Valley, a pure engineering man is seen as a lackey. An engineer with business cred is considered valuable, just my experience.

The US already has HIPAA, so I don't get the point. This just seems like a weak attempt to say something negative about Google's announcement.

To the contrary, they have utter regard for your privacy. They advocate for governments to have more respect for your privacy, as well.

Alfred knows everything about Bruce Wayne. Google is Alfred, except he doesn't even take a salary - he wants to show you advertising that you would think is high quality, and he promises to never sell your personal information to the advertisers. Pretty damned good deal, if you ask me.

It could take 20-30 years for their research and development to catch on, but I'd imagine some of Google's biggest followers/clients are in their 20's, 30's, 40's.

They wouldn't have launched this company if there was no "end-game" or no ultimate goal, and retaining customers indefinitely seems like the ultimate goal for any company.

Obligatory and irrelevant Google Reader reference. Check. Right, the world would be better off if Google spent more time investing in yet more social sharing web app features, and not on reducing high way fatalities or increasing health.

Missing. No mention of PRISM.

None of my friends are homo economicus, even qua investors. As much as we love earning more money, we also care about other people. We also like when the companies we part-own aren't evil.

As for the fact that 23andme's founder and Brin are married...you do understand the marriage of two CEOs does not equal the merger of companies...especially when the CEOs don't own the companies.

Presumably, its going to do research (probably secondary with an aim to commercialization, rather than basic research) on health problems, particularly on aging and aging-related diseases.

> The top comment makes me feel like I'm missing a magical paragraph in the OP that details their cure for death, ugliness and stupidity.

Its not a startup looking for venture capital that needs to demonstrate an MVP to attract investors in the near term, its a project that's already funded by Google as a small (by comparison to Google's available resources), effort. Efforts like that don't need to have a product on day one, they need a mission.

-----

I’m excited to announce Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being, in particular the challenge of aging and associated diseases. Art Levinson, Chairman and former CEO of Genentech and Chairman of Apple, will be Chief Executive Officer.

OK … so you’re probably thinking wow! That’s a lot different from what Google does today. And you’re right. But as we explained in our first letter to shareholders, there’s tremendous potential for technology more generally to improve people’s lives. So don’t be surprised if we invest in projects that seem strange or speculative compared with our existing Internet businesses. And please remember that new investments like this are very small by comparison to our core business.

Art and I are excited about tackling aging and illness. These issues affect us all—from the decreased mobility and mental agility that comes with age, to life-threatening diseases that exact a terrible physical and emotional toll on individuals and families. And while this is clearly a longer-term bet, we believe we can make good progress within reasonable timescales with the right goals and the right people.

Our press release has a few more details though it’s still very early days so there’s not much more to share yet. Of course when Art has something more substantial to communicate (and that will likely take time), he’ll provide an update. Finally, thanks to Bill Maris for helping bring this idea to life and getting Art involved, and to Sergey Brin for consistently supporting 10X thinking like this. It’s hard for many companies to make long term investments. So I’m tremendously excited about the innovative new way we’re funding this project. Now for the hard work!

http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2013/09/calico-announcement....

stop getting emotionally attached to google products. they aren't your children.

They already went thru one iteration of electronic medical record, which is too bad because it sounded interesting but the first time I heard about it was on a READER feed as it was being shutdown. Before READER shut down of course.

Its more like Genentech (at least in focal domain) than Monsanto, but "Genentech for Nerds" would be still just be Genentech -- who, incidentally, shares its Chairman with Calico.

One of my biggest clients is in the medical device industry. From the surface appearance, any company could make a simulacrum of their main products with perhaps 90% cost-cutting... but life-saving devices are not like inferior iPods or graphic designs. It's not just things like a crappy user interface, poorer display quality and periodic crashes interrupting your musical flow you would have to deal with if any New Jack could make medical devices, but infection, worsened health, extraneous visits to doctors, untraceable health conditions, lack of accountability by your doctor and yes, death through everyday use, etc. After hearing conservative cheapskates bitch about wasted expenses of FDA regulation and liberals bitch about "how easy it is to walk around the FDA," I have come to fully doubt both (read: realize how much they're talking out of their ani) and respect the FDA after working in such close vicinity to them.

And anyway, yes anyone can voluntarily place any therapy in your body- you just can't get a corporation to help you with it in the U.S.

In the age of patent medicines where you could freely use any kind of "medicine" or treatment this was not true at all. Medicine is not simple to understand or develop and asking the average person to make this evaluation is enabling a system that will take money from people in exchange for making their health worse. The kickstarter model is not appropriate for medicine.

Yeah... they should have gone with Doctr.