In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

April 21, 2011
Steven Levy | Wired Magazine

Today it seems hard to believe that Google got its start barely a dozen years ago in a rented house in Silicon Valley. Its internet search engine abruptly changed the way people accessed information, and then the way they worked, shopped, entertained themselves, and learned. Google’s wildly profitable ad business turned its founders into billionaires and shook the traditional media industries to their foundations. From the very start, its founders saw Google as a vehicle to realize their dream of using artificial intelligence to augment humanity.

Speaker Details

Steven Levy is a senior writer at Wired magazine. He was formerly a senior editor and chief technology writer at Newsweek magazine. He has written on technology for a wide variety of publications, including Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The New York Times. He is the author of several books, most notably Hackers, a classic account of the early computer era and Insanely Great, the story of the development of the Macintosh computer.