Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin recently sat down for a rare interview together, moderated by technology venture capitalist Vinod Khosia. The pair discussed a wide variety of topics, but one stood out: trimming the work week so most of a person's time can go toward the things — and people — they love most.
"If you really think about the things you need to make yourself happy — housing, security, opportunity for your kids... it's not that hard for us to provide those things," Page said. "The idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet peoples' needs is not true."
This is a topic Page has chatted about with business magnate Richard Branson. "They don't have enough jobs in the U.K.," Page said, and Branson has been "trying to get people to hire two part-time people instead of one full-time, so at least the young people can have a half-time job rather than no job."
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What Page would really like to see is the creation of robots and machines to assist people with whatever they may need, providing a "time of abundance," but Brin's not entirely on board. "I don't think that in the near-term, the need for labor is going away," he said. "It gets shifted from one place to another, but people always want more stuff or more entertainment or more creativity or more something."
Watch the entire conversation between Page, Brin, and Khosia below. --Catherine Garcia
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