With Big Data Comes Big Responsibility
“You should presume that someday, we will be able to make machines that can reason, think and do things better than we can,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in a conversation with Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla.
Context & Ripple Effects
Om Malik's column lands on a quote from the annual Khosla Ventures CEO Summit, where Larry Page and Sergey Brin sat for a fireside chat with Vinod Khosla over the July 4th weekend: Brin told Khosla that we should presume machines will someday "reason, think and do things better than we can." That framing extends an identity Google has claimed for years — as far back as 2007, observers described the company as being all about large amounts of data, and CNN was speculating about "the Google future" back in February 2006.
What changed by July 2014 is that the endpoint of that data strategy is being stated aloud by a founder rather than inferred from product moves — from Project Glass pledges in 2012 to the data-intensive bets Google had already made. The quote traveled unusually fast for a fireside-chat remark: TechCrunch, Fast Company and Dice News picked up the story the same week, alongside a cluster of high-profile tech writers sharing it directly.
First-order effects
- Brin's remark, made on Khosla Ventures' own stage, gives the firm's portfolio an explicit investment thesis: the consumer-data archives companies are building are framed as the raw material for machines that eventually reason better than people.
- With TechCrunch, Fast Company and prominent tech writers amplifying the quote within days, Google's founders' expectation for machine intelligence becomes a public benchmark that rivals and policymakers alike can hold the company to.
Second-order effects
- Other holders of large consumer datasets face pressure to declare whether their data is merely targeting fuel or, per Brin's framing, the training substrate for autonomous reasoning systems — a distinction that forces AI ambition into competitor messaging.
- Khosla Ventures putting its founder in conversation with a Google co-founder signals to other investors that data-heavy startups warrant a premium, pushing capital toward whoever controls the largest corpora.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — data scale as the declared path to machines that outperform human cognition — 'responsibility' migrates from privacy compliance to governing systems whose capabilities exceed their builders', a regulatory agenda that in mid-2014 no agency has begun to staff.
- Structurally, value concentrates around owners of the biggest data corpora, turning a handful of consumer platforms into de facto infrastructure for whatever machine intelligence gets built on top of them.
The trend: Consumer-data platforms are openly reframing their accumulated data as the substrate for machine intelligence intended to exceed human capability, shifting the debate from collection to responsibility.